


Ginny Weasley's Secret Enchantment

by hiddyquo



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Aww, Drama, F/F, Humour, Lesbian, Mild Smut, Overclever Metanarrative, Romance, THP/DH Concurrent
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-08
Updated: 2019-09-28
Packaged: 2019-10-06 20:24:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 30,601
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17352005
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hiddyquo/pseuds/hiddyquo
Summary: After consciously uncoupling with Harry, Ginny jumps into bed with Hermione. It might be love, but when Hermione departs to save the world Ginny must return to Hogwarts alone. Will Ginny and Hermione's barely-begun relationship have universe-shaking ramifications, in the wizarding world's darkest year? At the hotbed of Sapphism that is Hogwarts, will Ginny manage to stay faithful to her absent not-quite-girlfriend? And, most important of all - will Ginny be able to help Neville with a very peculiar request?





	1. Chapter 1

“Ginny, you’re writing a book? You?”

“I _am_ a journalist,” I remind her sniffily.

“A sports journalist.”

“Stop bullying me, Hermione.”

“Sorry,” she says. “What’s it about, then, this book? Quidditch?”

“No, it’s about various sexual encounters I had or didn’t have when I was sixteen.”

“Sex?” Her eyes widen. “Ginny – _us_? What do you mean? How much detail are you-”

“Nothing graphic. No tortuously extended metaphors of crescendoing waves, anyway.”

“But – do you mean people will _read_ this-”

“No. I’m not going to release it, I just want to write it. I’m working through some things. Something in particular.”

Hermione’s brow furrows further with each sentence. “What brought this on?” she asks.

“A request from a friend.”

“Who?”

“Never you mind.”

“Ginny, if someone has asked you to send them titillating details of our sex life twenty years ago, I’d like to know who it is so I can go and kick their arse.”

“Hermione, while I’d love to see you attempt to kick someone’s arse, I’m afraid it would be unwarranted on this occasion. Neville-”

“ _Neville_ -”

“Neville,” I continue over her, “didn’t ask me to send him anything. Titillating or otherwise. Obviously. He asked me to help him with something. A professional matter.”

She squints at me. “Nothing sexual?”

“Nothing sexual,” I affirm. “But it’s something I’m not quite ready to do, and – and I think writing this might maybe help.”

She chews over that for a long moment. “Fine,” she says finally. She knows me too well to think she’ll wheedle anything more out of me on the matter until I’m ready to divulge. She hefts the half-finished manuscript on my desk. “You’re certainly churning these pages out,” she says.

“Well, it’s my life. Writing’s a lot easier when you already know what happens when to whom.”

“Ginny, there are so many spelling mistakes in this-”

“Plus,” I cut her off, “I’m working to a pretty tight deadline.”

“A deadline? I thought you said you weren’t going to publish this?”

“I’m not.”

“Fine,” she sighs, “be enigmatic. When’s the deadline?”

“Two weeks from now. The end of August.”

“I don’t suppose you got an advance for this?”

“From who? You’re the only one in the world who knows that it exists.”

“So I’m losing you to your typewriter for the next two weeks for no benefit to us at all?”

“Yep. Love you,” I smile.

Hermione flips through the first few pages of the manuscript, then frowns. “Ginny, I remember that first time very differently.”

“Oh, let’s not get into debates over whose memory is better than whose.”

She looks around shiftily, leans low over the desk to whisper. “You _know_ I didn’t come that night.”

“Blame sixteen-year-old me’s fragile ego and overactive imagination,” I suggest. “The early chapters are pretty much lifted from stuff I wrote back then, stuff I hadn’t looked at for twenty years. Why waste the words, I figured.”

“Diary entries?”

“More like lurid fantasies.”

Hermione glances back down at the page. “Yes, now that you mention it I can tell you wrote this when you were sixteen.”

“I’ve toned down the blue bits a lot,” I tell her.

Hermione skips on a few pages further, then claps her hand to her mouth to suppress a giggle. “What?” I demand.

“Nothing, Ginny, I’m – I’m just rather flattered by your descriptions of me. God,” she rubs a hand across her forehead, “no one can ever see this...”

She returns her attention to the manuscript, lips curled upwards at the corners. Half a minute later she glances at me suspiciously. “What was that you said earlier about _various_ sexual encounters?”

I shuffle my papers. “You’ll just have to wait until I’ve finished the book,” I say.

“Oh, who was it? Michael Corner?”

“Nuh-uh. Not a guy.”

“ _Really_? I was always sure you’d given men another try that year. You never talked about it, but some things people said...”

“You should have had more self-confidence.”

“So, there was another _lady_ in young Ginny’s life...” Hermione is counting off potential suspects on her fingers. “Er – Romilda, Demelza – you know, I can’t recall the names of any girls in your year at all except-” her eyes widen. “You and Luna didn’t-”

“I don’t kiss and tell.”

“This entire book is kissing and telling,” she points out.

“Look, I did not shag Luna.”

“Good,” she says.

“Fine,” I say.

“So, who was it-”

I press a finger to her lips. “All will be revealed once I’ve finished, okay?”

“Okay,” she sighs, before stooping to kiss me. “I’ll prep the divorce papers.”

* * *

**1**

I tell myself solemnly to pull myself together. He’s just another boy, after all. I’ve been through enough of  _those_ over the past couple of years. But deep down I know this wasn’t just another school fling, or shouldn’t have been. This was Harry Potter, the boy for whom my embarrassingly intense crush has been a reliable source of public amusement and personal humiliation for the past six years. I suppose I should have seen it coming. He’s the Chosen One; I’m the one chosen for a few weeks until he pisses off to save the world. He’s the Boy who Lived, I’m – well, take your pick. The Girl who got Laughed At? The Girl who was Lied To? It wouldn’t be  _safe_ for us to be together, he told me. He said he didn’t want to put me in  _danger_. What a load of bollocks. It’s such bollocks it’s almost brilliant. I think I’ll use that one next time  _I’ve_  gotten sick of someone, in fact. Sorry, we need to stop shagging, I need to go off and defeat You-Know-Who-

“Any time you like, dear.”

The Fat Lady’s voice jolts me out of my reverie. When I come to I find my aimless trudging has brought me to the entrance to the Gryffindor common room. The Fat Lady stands before me, tapping her foot impatiently. For a moment I consider turning, trudging on, but people with loud chattering voices are coming up the stairs a flight below. I don’t think I can face anyone right now. Our dormitory will be empty; I just want to go to sleep and hope that when I wake up the world has somehow rewound to a week ago, when my life still bore some faint semblance of normality. Maybe while I sleep a blood vessel in my brain will catastrophically and fatally burst. Here’s hoping. I give the password and climb through the portrait hole.

For the first time in my five years at Hogwarts, the Gryffindor common room is deserted. Everyone is out in the sunshine, I guess. Maybe it’s for the best that my boyfriend abruptly dumped me, I reflect, squinting out an open window against the sun’s brilliant bathing glare; five minutes out in that and I would be a giant walking freckle. A little purple butterfly flutters in through the window, circles my head once, then lands on my shoulder. I feel like it’s mocking me, somehow, and I shoo it away. I turn quickly, intent on hurrying upstairs to avoid the pressing Harry-shaped memories the common room brings unwillingly to mind-

“Ginny?”

Hermione stands at the foot of the stair that leads to the girls’ dormitories. Like me, she’s still wearing the dress robes we wore to the funeral. She’s let her hair down, though. She must read something of my inner turmoil in my body language, because the smile she gives me quickly turns uncertain and fades.

“Hi, Hermione. Up feeding Crookshanks again? You spoil that cat.” I make to slip past her to the stairs. “I was just going to bed-”

“Ginny.” Her touch stops me like a brick wall, her fingertips  _just_ resting against the skin of my forearm. “Is something wrong?”

 

“You looked nice in your dress robes,” I comment.

“So did you.”

“That is a stinking lie.”

“It is not.”

I sit in an armchair pulled up to the very edge of her dormitory four-poster. She sits on the bed just across from me. Her legs are in my lap and mine are in hers. I don’t quite remember why. It happened a few sips of Firewhisky ago, I think. We’ve been passing a bottle back and forth. We’ve long since ditched our dress robes: mine cast vindictively to the floor, Hermione’s neatly packed away in her trunk. She’s wearing a Gryffindor t-shirt and little matching shorts – it’s very cute.

“I bet yours actually fit,” I say. “Maybe they’re even vaguely comfortable to wear. I mean, you didn’t even bother changing out of them when you came up here to feed Crookshanks. Mine on the other hand are the usual handmedowns. Wearing them is absolute agony. I was counting down the moments until I could get out of them.”

“You did look quite nice, though.” Hermione smiles. “You’ll have to wear them again at Bill and Fleur’s wedding.”

“Oh no. I’m never putting those monstrosities back on. I’m bleeding, look!”

Hermione peers closely as I turn my leg to indicate the thin red line etched across my inner thigh by four hours spent in the hated robes. “You’re not bleeding,” she says, “don’t exaggerate.”

“I think I might lose the leg.”

“Would you like me to try and heal it?”

“Does it involve you applying ointment? Because if so, yes.”

Hermione eyes me for a long moment. In the end, she just smiles slightly.

“Come closer,” I tell her. “It can’t be good for your back, sitting up straight like that with no support.”

“Yes, it’s almost as if someone stole my armchair.”

“Come closer,” I repeat. I reach out and, taking both her hands, draw her right to the edge of the bed. I lock my legs around her waist to hold her in place.

“You’ve cheered up,” she says.

“Uh-huh.”

“Have you ever done this before?” she asks.

“Done what?”

“Talked someone through a break-up.”

“Yeah,” I say.

“Is a hug traditional at this point?”

“Yeah, it’s pretty standard.”

“Let’s hug then,” she says.

She prises her hands from my grip and wraps her arms tightly around me. Her head goes over my shoulder, while I find my face nestled in the crook between her shoulder and her neck. “Now we sit like this for maybe twenty to thirty minutes,” I say.

“If that’s what girls do,” she says.

 

Somewhere in our transfer from the armchair to the bed, we manage to establish that Hermione expects no one will be bursting into the dormitory to disturb us. Parvati and Lavender have gone home, she says. Why exactly we might worry about being disturbed goes unmentioned. It’s dark outside the dormitory windows now.

“Do you feel better?” Hermione asks. “About Harry?”

“I’d feel better now if you could stop touching my arse for one solitary minute.”

“I don’t know where else I’m supposed to put my hands. They have to go somewhere, Ginny.”

We’ve long since finished the Firewhisky. I wriggle backwards under the covers, enjoying the sensation of Hermione’s body pressing against mine. Hermione’s hands are warm and wandering. Soft, too. She brushes my hair away from my face. “I always loved your hair,” she murmurs. “What are we doing, Ginny?”

“Nothing,” I say.

“I’m glad to hear it.”

 

Gradually I wake to the smell of her perfume. We lie next to each other in Hermione’s narrow four-poster bed. She’s naked. I’m naked. We’re naked. Our legs are jumbled together. Most of us is hidden underneath the covers. Not enough. Her eyes open a second after mine, and neither of us says anything for a moment.

“Jesus,” I say. I roll onto my back.

“I suppose that’s one way for you to get back at Harry,” she comments.

“Well, I couldn’t very well shag my brother. I mean, I don’t know what you see in him.” This draws a mild mutual chuckle from us. I trail a hand across my forehead and rub at my eyes. “Oh my god, I don’t know where this came from...”

“Me neither,” she says.

I glance at her, bright brown eyes twelve inches away across the pillows. Vivid images rush to the front of my mind – Hermione before me, thighs trembling, Hermione falling back flat on the bed, Hermione sitting up, kissing me, manoeuvring me onto my back…

“I enjoyed it, though,” I say.

“Me too,” she says. She sits up against the headboard, covering her breasts with an arm. “What time is it?”

“I don’t know. Late. We’re leaving today, aren’t we?”

“We are,” she says. “We won’t see each other again until I come to the Burrow.”

“The Burrow – we’ll be in the same room. God, that’ll be-”

“Convenient?” she laughs.

After a second, I just about manage to join her in a feeble chuckle. I can feel my brain about to explode once I leave this room, but somehow I’m managing to hold onto some last strand of sanity for these final few minutes in bed.

“We’d better get dressed,” Hermione says. She makes to slip out from under the covers.

“Hermione?” Halfway off the four-poster, she turns. “Did you know Harry was going to chuck me?” I ask her.

“No,” she says.

“Did you hope?”

“Ginny, I never felt the slightest attraction to you until the moment I saw you standing at that window down in the common room. It must’ve been those dress robes.”

I lean across to kiss her, lightly. She lets me.

* * *

“It didn’t happen anything like that,” Hermione complains.

Hammering away at my typewriter, I’m not really listening. We sit on opposite sides of my desk in the cramped little office I keep at the back of the house: me hunched over a keyboard, her reclining luxuriantly by comparison in a cushy red armchair. It’s a hot and humid day, and we’ve thrown the window carelessly open. A pitcher of cold lemonade sits on the desk between us.

“It couldn't have happened like that,” she continues doggedly, “because I was with Ron after the funeral, and then we had the big talk with Harry about the next year after that. And then the Hogwarts Express left with all of us on it an hour later! It was at the Burrow we got together. And we did not just  _jump_ into bed together while tonked on bloody Firewhisky! It was three days of you moping around about Harry and me doing my clueless best to comfort you before we had our first undignified fumble.”

“Mm-hmm,” I say.

“Ginny, I’m serious. You’ve tossed away the entire start of our relationship!”

I finish the paragraph I’m working on, then lever my fingers off of the typewriter keys. “So you want me to write our coming together at a vulnerable moment in our young lives – two young women living at a time of death and turmoil, facing uncertain and frightening futures, finding first an emotional and then a physical connection – finding something beautiful and desirable and necessary there in one another that they had somehow never seen before?”

“Yes.”

“Well, that’s a lot harder to write than just having us shag and then love each other forever.”

“Ginny-”

“Look, Hermione, I didn’t want to spend ages on this bit. This isn’t the part I need to write. I don’t need to work through any issues regarding  _our_ relationship. Our relationship is lovely.”

Her frown abates somewhat.

“Like I said,” I continue, “the first few chapters are based on these ridiculous fantasies I made up and wrote down back then. I’ve cut out bits and added the odd scene here or there, but that’s it. Don't consider them my record of our early relationship. Consider them an evocation.”

“An evocation.”

“We were cute in the first chapter, weren’t we?”

“I suppose,” she concedes. “Though I don’t talk anything like the way you have me talking. You have us in the exact same voice, Ginny. I sound like you!”

“It’s symbolic.”

“Symbolic of what?”

“That we’re soulmates. Two halves of one whole.”

She flushes slightly. “Well, I have absolutely no idea what this is going to have to do with Neville, but I am intrigued to find out. One more thing, since I’ve briefly managed to pull your attention away from that typewriter – why did you mention some butterfly at the common room window?”

“It represents one possible future vanishing and a new one clunking into place.” I wink at her. “Our future.”

“So, you didn’t really see a butterfly.”

“No, Hermione, I did not.”

As I return to typing, she stands. She still has the manuscript in her hand. “Don’t leave that somewhere Rose might find it,” I warn. "She's warped enough already."

“God, no." Hermione shudders. "Can you imagine…”

 


	2. Chapter 2

**2**

Outside the train window, the world is dark and wet. I lean past Neville’s shoulder to address my brother. “Ron, can you see anything outside? We must be nearly there by now.”

“Ask Harry,” Ron says without lifting his eyes from the chessboard he and Neville have placed on the seat between them.

“Harry’s sleeping.”

“He’s not.”

“I am,” Harry mumbles from his slumped seat opposite Ron.

“Fine,” Ron relents. He gives his bishop its orders, then leaves Neville to mull over his options and swivels in his seat to peer out the window. “Can’t see much,” he reports back. “Just fields.”

“Any city lights?” I ask hopefully.

“Nah,” he says.

I make a noise somewhere in between a yawn and a groan, and sink deep down in my seat. I close my eyes for a while, hoping the low repetitive sounds of Ron and Neville calling moves to their pieces might lull me to sleep. When that fails I stare at the walls, the floor, the ceiling, the luggage rack – in short, at everything and everyone except Hermione.

It’s not that I don’t _want_ to look at her, obviously. I linger riskily on her now, unable to help myself. She sits directly across from me, immersed in a book. Every time the train jolts and our knees bump I nearly hit the ceiling. It’s absolutely pathetic.

This has been the longest train journey of my life.

While turning a page, Hermione glances up and catches me watching her. She smiles, a tiny little twitch of her lips no one else notices, and begins tracing circles against my shin with the toe of her boot. I start upright and nearly clatter my head against the luggage rack. “I’m – er – going to find the trolley lady,” I announce to the compartment. “I’m starving.”

“Good idea,” Neville says over his shoulder. “I’ll come with you.”

“Me too,” Ron chimes in.

Great, I think. I hadn’t intended to lead a supply party, merely escape this compartment for a few sanity-restoring minutes. “No,” I say quickly, “you two stay. Finish your game. Tell me what you want, I’ll get it for you. Harry, Hermione – anything?”

Pockets are raided for stray Knuts and Sickles, and orders conveyed to me. Coin-purse jingling, I exit the compartment and slide the door shut behind me. Once I’m a few steps down the corridor and safely out of sight, I lean against the corridor wall and trail a hand across my face. Needless to say, I had not intended to spend this train journey in an enclosed space with the boy who broke up with me yesterday and the girl I woke up with this morning. I got talking to Neville at the station, and then Ron came over, and then somehow I got swept along with them…

I don’t know how Hermione seems so unfazed by our close proximity. I can’t stop thinking about last night: can’t stop replaying it in my head, wondering why it happened, wondering what might happen now… God, I hope this passes fast.

 

“There you are, Ginny!”

As I plod through carriage after carriage in search of the confectionery trolley, a compartment door opens suddenly behind me and an excitable dark-haired head pops out.

“Hi Jen,” I say. “Have you seen the trolley lady-”

“Never mind that,” she interrupts, “where have you _been_? You weren’t in the dormitory last night.”

“I fell asleep in the library,” I say.

“A likely story,” she laughs. “Were you with the chosen one?”

“No. Harry and I broke up, actually.”

Her face falls. “Oh no, what happened?”

“It’s complicated,” I tell her truthfully.

The short friendly girl spreads her arms wide. “Come here, Ginnybug.”

“No, really, I’m fine-”

“Come here,” she insists.

Reluctantly, I accede to her hug. She wraps her arms around me tightly. “I want to hear all about it,” she says in my ear. “Come inside.”

“Jen, I just need to find the trolley lady-”

But she refuses to take no for an answer, practically dragging me out of the corridor and into her compartment. She has two travelling companions, I see. One is Oakley, a girl in our year who plays Chaser for the Ravenclaw Quidditch team. Playing against her has been pretty much the full extent of our acquaintance, though she’s always seemed nice enough. She’s a decent player, though I’m better. And the other girl in Jen’s compartment is-

“Luna!” I exclaim.

“Hi Ginny,” the blonde-haired girl says, before fixing me with one of those funny looks that never fail to make me faintly uncomfortable.

“What,” I ask, “has my aura changed or something?”

“No, it’s just that there’s a long brown hair poking out from under your shirt collar.” She reaches across and plucks it free, then lets it fall to the floor.

“Must be from hugging Hagrid,” I say. I look past Luna to the compartment’s other inhabitant. “Hi, Oakley.”

“Hi,” she says.

Outside the window the weather remains thoroughly miserable, worsening if anything; a sudden strong gust of wind sends rain battering against the glass, startling us all. “Nice Quidditch weather,” I comment. “Are you playing next year?”

“Unless they chuck me off the team,” she says. “Which is quite possible.”

“Really? I thought you were probably your best player in that last match against us.”

She smiles. “What was the score in that one, like five hundred to fifty?”

“Sounds about right,” I concede. “Planning to play much over the summer?”

“At my Dad’s crummy flat?” She makes a face. “I won’t touch a broom for two months.”

“That sucks,” I say. “I play with my brothers in the summer all the time.”

“I’m insanely jealous.”

On a sudden impulse, I pull a pen out of my pocket. “Why don’t you come to mine sometime?” I ask. “We can practice together. I’ll give you the address.”

She shakes her head. “I don’t want to impose-”

“You won’t be imposing,” I insist, “my mother will be happy to have you. It’ll have to be after my brother’s wedding, on the first of August, but you can write to me anytime after then if you want to come over.”

“Thanks,” she says. “Really.”

I scribble the address for the Burrow on the back of Oakley’s hand. “I’ve always wanted to do this for someone,” I comment while writing.

“Honoured,” she says.

“Thank God for that,” Jen interjects as I straighten. “All Maddy’s done since we left Hogwarts is sulk and moan about how miserable she’s going to be all summer. You’re a saint, Ginny.”

“I try,” I say.

 

Returning to Ron and Neville with my pockets stuffed full of Chocolate Frogs, I go through a door between carriages and walk straight into Hermione.

“There you are,” she says. We halt a moment close together in the little shaded alcove at the end of the carriage, the door I entered through swinging shut behind us. Involuntarily I find myself drifting closer to her, until our noses are almost touching. “We were wondering where you’d gotten to. We thought you’d taken the money and ran.”

“I thought about it,” I say.

Our noses bump, and Hermione smiles. “I almost thought,” she says, "that you’d gotten bored of staring gormlessly at me for hours on end.”

“You weren’t exactly helping,” I mutter.

“What did you want me to do? Let you hover over me like a vulture while I’m trying to read?”

“You could have stopped teasing me.”

“Ginny, I’m sure I don’t know what you mean-”

I dart in and kiss her. She pulls away for a moment, then relents. Her hands run through my hair. When mine stray underneath her cardigan, though, she pulls away. “We can’t,” she warns.

“Half the compartments are empty...”

“And the corridors are being patrolled. You think they won’t notice if an empty compartment is suddenly locked with the curtains drawn?”

I kiss her again. We both know we can’t, but we can’t bring ourselves to go back to the others so soon. After Hermione breaks the kiss we just stand there for a few more precious seconds, our bodies pressing close together, her breathing rhythmic in my ears, her chest slowly rising and falling beneath my fingers…

“We have to go back,” she says.

“At Platform 9 & ¾,” I murmur, “you’ll spend ten times longer saying goodbye to Ron and Harry than you will to me, won’t you? It’ll be just ‘see you later Ginny’, ‘see you Hermione’...”

“I have to, Ginny.”

I trace a disbelieving finger from the corner of her lips across her cheek, along the curve of her jaw, down her neck to the collar of her t-shirt. “What will you want to do?” I ask her.

“I never thought you’d be such a needy lover, Ginny.” She smiles. “I suppose I’ll want to kiss you.”

“Good,” I say.

“Come on,” she repeats softly, “let’s get back.” She takes me by the hand and leads me back to the compartment.

 

“Hold on,” Ron complains when I toss him his three Chocolate Frogs. “These are all crushed. And this one is half-melted.”

I shrug. “Tastes the same, doesn’t it?”


	3. Chapter 3

“This next chapter seems awfully short,” Hermione says.

"Sorry. I got lazy. I thought about padding it out with an erotic dream sequence, but I decided against it."

She raises an eyebrow. "Oh?"

"Yeah. I have a couple of these loose scenes lying around from my sixteen-year-old fantasies that I have no other use for. But it's too embarrassing, I had to cut it."

"Have you still got this scene you were going to use?"

"No," I say.

Her eyes drift to a few folded pages half-hidden underneath a box of tissues on my desk. "What are those, then?"

"Nothing - Hermione!"

My wife has leapt out of her armchair and darted around my desk to snatch up the cut scene. I jump up from my own chair and wrestle with her for the papers. We find ourselves sinking to the rug, still tugging and pulling back and forth, until Hermione finds herself seated atop my waist with her knees to either side of me. She lifts the pages high out of my reach in triumph.

"And you grew up with six brothers," she scorns as I wriggle futilely beneath her. We're both breathing rather heavily. 

With the manuscript in one hand and the cut scene in the other, she begins to read aloud.

* * *

  **3**

I sit in the garden of the Burrow picking daisies. I pull the little white petals off one at a time. “I’ll write to her, I won’t write to her. I’ll write to her, I won’t write to her...”

The last petal flutters to the ground. The ruined green stem looks rather sad in my hand. I set it down on the grass then seize up another flower. “She loves me,” I murmur aloud, “she loves me not...”

 

I sprawl in a little shaded corner of the garden. I’m hidden from view from the house or the path or anywhere really by tall bushes on all sides. Above, the sky is blue and the sun is brilliant. I brought a book out here with me, which was optimistic. I’ve been trying to read it for a while but I haven’t gotten past the first few pages, can’t concentrate on it at all. It’s been two weeks since I last saw Hermione. The vividity of my memories of our brief moments together has started to dim. I used to see her every time I turned a corner, every time I closed my eyes. I used to smell her perfume every time I woke up. Now I can’t even really remember what we said to each other that morning, before we got dressed and went downstairs to the Great Hall for lunch. Maybe in another week or two I’ll have forgotten whether it ever actually happened at all.

I decide to discard the dismembered daisy’s advice, and begin composing a letter to her in my head. Now, if only I actually had something I wanted to say to her… I’d tell her about what I’ve been up to, but I’ve been up to precisely nothing; I play Quidditch every afternoon and I finger myself three times a day. I’d tell her about the Burrow, about my family, but she already knows all that. I’d reminisce about our past, if we had one, tell her how I felt about our relationship, if we had one, discuss our future, if we had one…

“Dear Hermione,” I say. “No, too terse.” I’ve started talking to myself in the past fortnight, I’ve noticed. I’m sure it’s perfectly healthy behaviour. “To Hermione. Hi Hermione. Hermione. Dearest Hermione. Hey, Hermione. To my darling Hermione...”

I can settle on an opening later, I decide. “Your bed’s all ready for you in my room,” I continue. “You were moaning about the springs digging into your back last year so I tried to fix it. I don’t really know how beds work but I got Dad to take a look at it and it feels alright to me now. Not that she’ll be using her bed, I hope,” I say aside to a little black beetle that’s just landed on my forearm. “I’ve put a vase up on the windowsill, I’m going to fill it with those red flowers you like from the garden once I find out when you’re coming here. I’m reading that book you wanted me to read last summer, it’s really good!”

I pause to shush a starling chirping merrily away in the bush behind me. “Shut it,” I snap, “I can’t hear myself think. Er – what else? Oh, I don’t know. Blah blah blah, hope you’re well. Kind regards, your friend Ginny. P.S., I think we should have sex again.”

Maybe I’ll take another run at it later, I decide, yawning. The humid summer heat has crept up on me, and I feel suddenly quite tired. But I do need to make a start on Hermione's bloody book. It sits beside me on the parched ground, looking as forlorn and unloved as ever a book has. Reluctantly I pick it up and, lying flat on my stomach on the cool soft grass, begin to read. I read the first three pages with a sense of resolute purpose. I fall asleep before the fifth page.

 

There’s a knock on the door.

Nervously, I pull the sheets up to my chin. It’s a hot summer night; I’m not wearing a thing. I hadn’t expected intruders. “Who is it?” I call, a slight tremor in my voice.

The door swings open. In the moonlight streaming in through my open bedroom window, I see a shadowy form slip inside. I’d recognise that silhouette anywhere.

“You can’t be here,” I say.

In the moonlight I see her smile. It’s strange – I can barely see my hand in front of my face, but Hermione’s features seem to glow and shimmer from six feet away. Still smiling, she points her wand towards the fireplace and murmurs something. A tall fire crackles into life, casting a warm glow over the room – over Hermione. She wears a tight-fitting dress, the hem just high enough to tease her thighs. She looks beautiful.

“This is a dream,” I say. It must be. Hermione’s at her parents’ house, hundreds of miles away. I’m just going to close my eyes, and she’ll be gone.

In a blink she crosses the room to stand by my elbow. She sits on the edge of my bed, by my waist. I shift uncomfortably away from her towards the wall. She raises an eyebrow. “Not happy to see me?”

“No,” I say. “We can’t be together, Hermione. I don’t want to be with you.”

Her hand, resting on top of the thin bedsheets, brushes my hip. I twitch violently, an electric jolt seeming to rush through every nerve in my body at once.

“I thought you didn’t want to?” she smirks.

“I don’t. I’m not attracted to you, Hermione. I’m not attracted to girls.”

Her hand reaches under the cover; I don’t say anything. Her fingers creep across my skin, tiptoeing closer and closer to my-

As I make to grab her hand she pulls away, and smiles again. She snatches up my wand from my bedside table and jumps to her feet, twirling it idly between her fingers. I’m still trapped in my nakedness beneath the covers. “Hey,” I say awkwardly, “what are you doing-”

She points my wand at my chest. “ _Petrificus Totalus_ ,” she whispers.

With every sinew in my body, I strain to move. My frozen limbs don’t shift an inch. I try to speak, but my tongue is stuck in place. Hermione grins wickedly. “I just got here,” she belatedly informs me, tossing my wand aside. “Your mum told me to make myself comfortable, so I think I will.”

She climbs onto the bed, straddles my hips. She begins to trail her hands over the sheets, over my body. She works painfully slowly, her hands making only the slightest infuriating contacts – brushing against my nipples, grazing the sides of my breasts. I think she’ll stop when she reaches the end of the covers, at my neck – but no, she keeps exploring. She cups my cheek, rearranges my hair, kisses my neck. I’m helpless to resist. “Hermione...” I moan weakly.

“Shh!” she urges, placing a finger to my lips. “You’re mine now, Ginny.”

“You can’t-”

“Can’t I?” She leans in close to whisper in my ear. I feel her warm breath on my skin, the tip of her tongue on my earlobe. “I think I can do whatever I want.”

“Hermione-”

“No more talking,” she snaps. Her fingers coil around the end of the covers; she draws them down as far as my waist, exposing my torso. Starting at my neck she begins to kiss her way down my body, raising more goosebumps on my arms with every contact against my pale white skin.

“Hermione...”

“Shh,” she says again. She stretches up to kiss my lips. The kiss itself is oddly chaste, but she has my breast in her hand and her thumb is teasing my nipple.

Then she reaches back behind her and throws the rest of the sheets off of the bed. She guides my legs apart and kneels between them.

 

When I come my back arches and my hips raise up off the bed in sheer exhilaration. Chest heaving, I sit up. I look down the bed at Hermione, still between my legs. For some reason she’s laughing. It’s only then that I realise-

“I can move,” I say. “You – you-”

“Me, me.” She cackles at the gradually dawning comprehension on my face. “I undid the spell after about ten seconds.”

“Ah,” I say sheepishly.

 

When I wake in the little clearing in the bushes, it’s the late afternoon. I’ve been asleep for a few hours. Still yawning, I head back inside the house. I’m overdue for a bit of Quidditch today, I think. I’m also overdue for the other thing. Ron is milling about in the kitchen when I enter.

“You’ve got a letter,” he tells me in between bites of his sandwich. The new mail sits on the kitchen table before him; he delves through the pile to find my letter. Before he slides it across the table to me, though, he frowns at the neat writing on the envelope. “Why’s Hermione writing to you?”

I shrug. “How should I know?”

Ron tosses the letter across the table to me. I take it up into my lap, turning it over and over out of Ron's sight like its some holy relic. I’m about to scarper off to my room to tear it needily open when I notice something Ron didn’t. I raise the letter into better light to be sure I'm not seeing things, but no - I'm not. On the back of the envelope Hermione dotted the ‘i’ in Ginny with a tiny, minuscule, microscopic little heart.

My own tiny minuscule microscopic little heart soars. That’s enough for me, I think. I don’t even care about the letter’s contents for the moment, about whatever banalities of Muggle life Hermione has chosen to relate to me. She’s thinking about me. She  _hearts_  me. I press the envelope close to my chest. Does it smell of her, or is that my pathetic imagination?

When I glance up, Ron’s looking at me. “Are you going to open it?” he enquires.

“Mind your own,” I say. I take a shiny green apple from the fruit bowl and bite into it. “Quidditch in fifteen?”

“Fine,” he says.

* * *

 Hermione giggles all the way through the dream scene. "Oh, Ginny. I'm not sure whether that was laughable or oddly sweet."

"That is a line I frequently walked when I was sixteen, yes. Are you going to let me up now?"

"I suppose," she says. "Or maybe I'll reach a hand under your bedsheets-" she teases at the buttons of my jeans- "and tiptoe closer and closer to your - what did you call it?"

"I didn't call it anything," I say. "I mean, what are you meant to call it?"

"Your flower."

"My secret treasure."

"Your altar of Aphrodite."

"My foof."

"Okay," she snorts, "that's enough." She clambers off of my waist. "I'm going to go make dinner," she says. "You've got another half an hour to write in here and that's it for the night, family time. Rose is starting to forget what your face looks like."


	4. Chapter 4

**4**

“Hermione’s here, Ginny!”

The shouted warning barely reaches my ears before my mother bustles into the bedroom. I’m lounging in my chair perusing an old Quidditch annual when she comes in. “Feet off the desk,” she chides me.

As I swing my legs down, Mum crosses the room to the spare mattress that is currently taking up most of the available floor space. She sets about transforming the neat pile of sheets and pillows atop the mattress into an approximate simulacrum of a made bed. “I’m sure I asked you to do this, Ginny.”

I just about manage to muster a mumbled, “sorry.” My attention is elsewhere – Hermione has just stepped into the bedroom doorway. The rain is bucketing down outside, and she’s dripping wet. Her hair is dark and draggled with water and clinging to her skin. Her clothes are sodden, her face pale and clammy. She looks beautiful, I think.

“Hello,” she says. She glances at Mum, whose back is turned to her, then flashes her eyebrows at me. It’s a quick little gesture of greeting, sweet in the familiarity with one another it implies – the sort where the brow twitch is accompanied by a slight upwards nod, a little widening of the eyes, a pulling up and out of the corners of the mouth in the vague direction of a smile. It says _hello_ , but also acknowledges some mutually perceived oddity.

Here, I think it says: _a bloody lot has changed between us very quickly without us really talking about it and I guess we’re probably going to have to sooner rather than later, but right now I’m just glad to be out of the rain and glad to see you_. Am I overanalysing Hermione’s facial features? Yes. Am I staring gormlessly at her? Definitely. If I try to speak, am I going to be able to muster any coherent English-language utterances? Probably not.

In return to Hermione’s gesture, I offer a slight bashful smile. A moment later Ron appears behind Hermione in the corridor lugging a heavy suitcase for her, though, and I quickly wipe the betraying expression off my face. “Hi Hermione,” I say casually.

“An emotional reunion,” Ron comments. He half-carries, half-drags Hermione’s suitcase over the threshold into my now-rather-crowded bedroom. “Not much room in here, is there? You two’ll be climbing all over each other.”

Hermione squelches forwards into the room after him, pulling her other suitcase. “I’m sure we’ll be fine,” she says breezily. She sets her case down, then takes her wet jacket off and goes to hang it up on the tall wooden coatrack in the corner.

Behind me, Mum is still persevering with her bold but doomed efforts to turn a battered, yellowed old mattress into five star accommodation. “You’re sleeping here, Hermione dear,” she tells Hermione. “It’s a bit basic, I’m afraid, it’s a week until Bill’s wedding and we’re having to cram so many people in...”

“It’s totally fine, Mrs Weasley. Thank you.”

Mum rearranges the pillows one last time, then straightens. “Ron and I will let you get unpacked and settled in, then. Dinner’s in an hour, girls.”

 

Hermione closes the door quietly shut behind them, then turns to face me. For a long moment we stare at each other, saying nothing. Then she smiles a wry little _isn’t-this-absurd_ smile, and I grin. “Back at the Burrow,” she says. She perches on the edge of my bed, pulls one of her suitcases towards her and begins digging through its contents. She finds a towel and starts to dry herself off. “It hasn’t changed a bit.”

“I’ve put some new posters up,” I say defensively. Seated where I am beneath the bedroom’s only window, I’m maybe five feet away from Hermione. For me, it might as well be a hundred miles. Every fibre of me wants to be nearer to her, but moving would be such a transparently needy gesture that I can’t quite bring myself to. “How was your journey?”

“Oh, fine,” she says. Towelling off completed, she’s now lifting books out of her suitcase and arranging them into alphabetically-ordered piles by the end of my bed. “How’s your summer been?”

“Good,” I say. “Yours?”

“Fine,” she shrugs.

I feel a sudden spurt of courage. “I’ve missed you,” I say.

Hermione glances up from her suitcase, and smiles. Closing the case she stands, and steps towards me across the mattress wedged into the narrow gap between desk and bed. Its springs squeak anaemically as they take her weight. She sits – casually, thrillingly, electrifyingly – on the desk beside me, and reaches out to toy with a strand of my hair. “I’ve missed you too,” she says.

I stretch up to kiss her. It’s a soft, unadventurous meeting of lips.

It’s the best kiss I’ve ever had.

 

All too quickly the call to dinner comes. As we’re finishing our meals high-ranking members of the Order begin to arrive, and I’m informed that Very Serious Business is to be conducted this evening. Hermione and Ron will be present and participating, but I’m considered surplus to requirements. I make a half-hearted attempt to eavesdrop, but soon I get bored and retreat back to my room. Hopefully Hermione will tell me later about anything interesting. Back at my desk with nothing to do, I gaze out the window at the turbulent skies. I hope the weather’s better tomorrow. If it’s sunny Hermione and I could go for a walk in the garden, or out in the fields. To the village, even, it’s not too far. I don’t want us to spend _all_ our time together. I don’t want her to get sick of me. But a walk would be nice, I think.

 

The Order meeting goes late. It’s past midnight by the time Hermione slinks back into my darkened room. Still I sit at my desk, doodling absent-mindedly in a notebook. The candle whose light I’m working by is burning low. Hermione enters silently – I don’t register her presence until the bedroom door _clunks_ shut behind her. I glance over my shoulder when I hear it. “Hi,” I say.

She looks disappointed. “Damn it. You looked really focused, I was going to try and sneak up on you.”

“If you wanted to give me a heart attack you could just slip some wolfsbane into my morning cup of tea, you know.”

Grinning, she pulls off her cardigan and stoops to fold it neatly away into her case. I turn back to my drawings, and don’t notice her creeping up behind me until her arms snake around my shoulders and her lips brush the side of my neck. “Were you waiting up for me?” she murmurs in my ear.

“No.”

“Liar,” she breathes amusedly. “What are you drawing?”

“Nothing,” I shrug. “Just practising faces from pictures in this old annual. The 1985-86 Holyhead Harpies squad.”

Hermione runs her fingers through my hair. “Was it a productive evening?”

“Nope,” I say. She brushes my fringe out of my eyes, takes a coil of red hair around her index finger. “Was yours?”

“Mmm.”

“Harry stuff?”

“Harry stuff,” she affirms. She releases my hair and I tilt my head aside and up to kiss her, but she turns away. “Hold on, I need to yawn.”

“Just yawn in my mouth. I want it.”

Laughing, she pulls away from me and straightens. “I’m absolutely exhausted,” she says. She yawns loudly to accentuate the point, stretching her arms high and wide. “Long day.”

“Get some sleep then,” I urge her. “I’m going to stay up a bit longer. I think if I draw a few hundred more noses my Holyhead Harpy faces might start looking a bit less like goblin faces.”

“You won’t mind if I go to bed?” she asks.

“No,” I insist.

She darts in on my other side to land a fleeting kiss on the corner of my mouth, then turns away. In the periphery of my vision I see her change for bed – delve through her suitcases to pull out a pyjama shirt, take her t-shirt off and pull the oversized nightshirt on, kick her jeans off. “Are you peeking?” she asks.

“No.”

She reaches behind her back to unhook her bra, then tosses it at me. “Hey,” I say, “you could have knocked the candle over. How would you explain to my mother that you burned the house down by throwing your bra at her daughter?”

Hermione shrugs, yawning again, then makes to climb beneath the sheets of the mattress on the floor. “Don’t be stupid,” I tell her, “take the bed.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. You’re an adult, Hermione, sleeping on the floor isn’t good for your back.”

“Am I going to find you crawling in beside me in the middle of the night?”

“Maybe,” I admit. “But I won’t wake you up, I promise.”

“I’ll hold you to that,” she says.

 

In the morning we wake slowly to sounds from downstairs of clattering pots and pans. “Mmm,” Hermione groans tiredly beside me. The sun is shining through a chink in the curtains directly onto her face. She stretches an arm out to lever herself away from the offensive beam, and involuntarily elbows me in the stomach. “Shit,” she says. “Sorry, Ginny.”

“It’s too late, you’ve founded our relationship upon domestic violence.”

Hermione kisses me quickly to make up for it then smiles at me, eyes blinking blearily. “Good morning," she says. “So you did crawl in.”

“Morning,” I say. “And I didn’t wake you up.”

For a few minutes we just lie in bed, talking – holding hands loosely above our pressed-together sides, staring up together at dust particles floating in the morning sunbeams. “So,” Hermione asks me, “do you think you're attracted to girls?”

“No,” I say. “I don’t know. Maybe. I haven’t spent any time around any girls since I last saw you – well, except for Fleur.”

“Well, are you-”

“No,” I snap, “I am not attracted to Fleur. Are you-”

“Well, she’s a beautiful woman-”

“Ew. No, I mean women in general.”

Hermione shrugs. “I’m like you, I don’t know. I’m attracted to you. What is it about me that attracts you?”

I pretend to chew it over. “I’d have to go with everything,” I say.

She squeezes my hand, then looks thoughtful. “It’s odd, isn’t it – how two people can feel absolutely no attraction to one another until someday, somehow, they just suddenly mutually notice that the other has a very nice arse? There must be some sort of chemical explanation.”

Hermione is prevented from expounding further upon her theories by a sudden clatter of footsteps outside my door. Hermione’s on the inside of the bed, the wall-side, so it falls upon me to throw myself out of bed and onto the mattress on the floor beside it in the second that passes before my mother enters the room. She doesn’t seem to notice that we’ve swapped beds.

“I need you two lazybones out weeding in the garden,” she tells us, sweeping imperiously across the bedroom to yank the curtains open. “Come on, chop chop, we’re having a wedding in a week!”


	5. Chapter 5

**5**

I wake to contrasting sensations. The pleasant sound of birdsong greets my ears; the putrescent stench of half-brewed Polyjuice Potion assaults my nostrils. I’m alone in bed. I can tell without opening my eyes, without moving a muscle – tell from the way the mattress beneath me is distributing my weight, from the lack of tension in the sheets pulled around me, from the faintness of her smell and the absence of her warmth. I open my eyes. “Good morning,” Hermione says. “Sleep well?”

“You know I didn’t,” I grumble. I sit up in bed, stretch my arms stiffly. “I’ve had a splitting headache ever since you started making that stuff in here – then when I  _do_  get to sleep the fumes give me crazy dreams. Last night I dreamt a fifty-foot-tall Chocolate Frog was chasing me through Diagon Alley.”

“Did it get you?”

“No, the sun started coming up and it melted.”

Hermione sits in the far corner of my bedroom, a quadrant of floorspace she has temporarily seized for herself, stirring the cauldron whose contents are so offensive to my nose. It’s my cauldron, actually, the one I use at school – or, specifically, it’s a cauldron I use that used to belong to George and before that Bill and before that, who knows: Mum, Mum’s mum, Mum’s mum’s mum. It’s a crappy old cauldron, is the point. Hermione says that’s partly why the smell’s so bad. Each time she stirs the cauldron, there’s another little burst of  _pops_ and  _hisses_ and more smelly steam rises into the air.

I watch her for a while. Every so often she will crinkle her nose as the potion responds to her ministrations in some minute suboptimal way that I am utterly blind to, and she’ll turn suddenly and rifle through her suitcases until she pulls out something – normally, something that looks a bit like a sprig of broccoli. Then she’ll chuck it into the cauldron and stir frantically for a minute or more, then all will be well again. She has a little magical fire burning in a jar beneath the cauldron. The heat from the fire has left my room hot and muggy, so she sits there by the cauldron in skimpy pyjamas – hair frazzled by the humidity, face flushed but adorably intent. Her eyes never leave the mixture for more than a moment.

“Doesn’t the smell affect you too?” I ask.

“I guess not,” she shrugs.

I cross the room to climb precariously atop my desk. I stick my head out of my open window and take in deep hungry gulps of mercifully fresh air. “It’s driving me crazy.”

“I gathered that when you started climbing out of a first floor window.”

“And it’s killing my flowers.” In the vase by my shins on the windowsill, the little red flowers I gathered in the garden are starting to brown and wither at the edges.

“Sorry,” I hear her say. “They’re very nice, Ginny, but this potion could be important.”

“Harry stuff,” I sigh. “I know. Some girls would be unhappy if their friends continued associating with their ex-boyfriends, you know.” I duck back inside and clamber off of my desk to the floor. I shove aside a mound of our clothes (dirtied in our garden duties and awaiting washing – Mum has been working us like house-elves this week in her efforts to get the Burrow ready for Bill’s wedding) and ease into a seated position behind Hermione. I poke idly at her socked foot, and she swats my hand away. “If I’d known you were going to sign me up to your Potions club this summer when I kissed you at Hogwarts, I might have reconsidered.”

“Ginny, the window’s open.”

“There’s no one around. Unless Ron’s been lurking in a bush beneath my window all night waiting for that dramatic reveal.” I lean forwards past her to peer into the cauldron, and quickly regret it. I pull away coughing, nostrils seared raw. “Mind you I suppose you’d still be making this potion in here even if we weren’t shagging, so I might as well be enjoying the perks.” I toy with her hair, try in vain to straighten it out a bit. “If the smell doesn’t improve I might have to start sleeping downstairs.”

“It’ll get worse before it gets better.”

“Then I guess I’m sleeping on the sofa tonight,” I say poutily. I rest my head on her shoulder, wrapping my arms around her waist. “You couldn’t just leave my room smelling like you...”

I feel like I could sit there in that position next to her all day, smell or no, but after a few minutes Hermione adds some new ingredient and there’s a sudden especially potent release of noxious gas from the cauldron. “God,” I exclaim, clapping a hand across my nose as I stagger to my feet, “what is that?”

“Dried dragon dung.”

“Is it going to  _keep_ smelling like that?”

“Quite possibly.”

“I’m sorry, Hermione, I can’t take this. You must have a stronger nose than me. I’m going downstairs to see if Mum needs to do anything.”

“Can you stand it in here another few minutes?” she asks. “I want to go down too.”

“Why?”

She lifts the heavy copper lid over the cauldron, and stands to take my hands in hers. “To cheer you up.”

 

“You’re awfully merry, Ginny.”

Mum and I kneel side by side in the bright July sunshine, scouring the garden flowerbeds for any last lingering weeds to tear out. “Am I?” I ask.

“You’re whistling,” she says. She tears out a little green frond and shoves it towards me, and I dump it into the heavy cotton bag I’m holding for her. “I think I know why, you know.”

“Oh?”

“Bill’s wedding,” she says knowingly. “It’s an exciting time for a fifteen-year-old girl-”

“Almost sixteen-”

“It’s the first wedding you’re experiencing as an adult, or nearly. It’s romantic, you’re thinking about love, you’re starting to picture your own wedding...”

“I am not.”

“Oh, you will as Bill’s big day comes closer. I think your wedding might be the one your father’s looking forward to most, you know. Only daughter and all of that.”

“Yeah,” I say quite mechanically. Thankfully Mum turns over a leaf and is distracted from the topic of my impending wedding to some tall handsome stranger by an entire cluster of thorny weeds.

“Goodness!” she exclaims. “I knew the twins hadn’t bothered clearing out under these bushes properly. Bring that bag over here, Ginny.”

She takes hold of the first unfortunate weed by its slender stem.

 

“You’re really sleeping down here?” Hermione asks after dinner.

“Yes,” I say.

 

I toss and turn on the hard uncomfortable couch, the stink of Hermione’s brewing potion still thoroughly embedded in my olfactory system, and dream. In my dream, Hermione is brewing Polyjuice Potion in my room. It stinks.

She stands up from the cauldron suddenly. She bounds across the room towards me, eases me down into a sitting position on the edge of my bed. Nervously, I laugh. “What is it?”

She reaches out a hand, brushes my hair out of my eyes. “You’re so beautiful, Ginny,” she murmurs.

“Hermione-”

Abruptly she lifts a stray red hair from my shoulder. “I think the potion’s done,” she says. “I need to test it.” Suddenly she has a flask in her hand, bubbling and smoking and full of murky liquid.

“No, wait-”

Before I can stop her Hermione drops my hair into the flask, and the liquid shimmers and changes colour. Our eyes meet. I feel frozen in place as Hermione drinks long and deep from the flask. For a moment, she just has a bubbly purple moustache. Then-

“Wow,” Hermione says. She turns side-on to examine herself in a full-length mirror. “You’re so slim!”

She feels at her hair, her ears, her nose, her hips, her legs, her breasts – or rather, my hair, my ears, my nose, my hips, my legs, my breasts. She glances happily at me, and the sight is so startling I almost recoil. It’s my face, but at the same time I can see Hermione so clearly. I know the expression she’s giving me; I just never thought I’d see it on my own face.

She takes my hands in my own. “This is too weird,” I say. She leans in to kiss me and I pull back, but inadvertently I topple backwards onto my bed. Hermione laughs, then pulls off her now-slightly-baggy clothes so that she now stands before me –  _I_ now stand before me – in just her bra and pants. Then she’s on top of me, kissing me, soft hands roaming...

Some time later I find myself between her legs. “I’ve never seen it from this angle before,” I comment.

“Take a closer look,” she urges.

 

“ _Ginny_.”

I start awake to someone shaking my shoulder. In the darkened living room of the Burrow, a shadowy figure looms over me. Still half-asleep, I’m frozen by fear. Then Hermione mutters, “ _Lumos_.”

“Please don’t do that again,” I say. “I will literally die.”

“Sorry,” she says quickly. She sits by my waist on the couch, places a comforting hand on my waist above the sheets. “What were you dreaming about? You were moaning...”

“Nothing,” I say. “Nothing psychologically worrying at all. I don’t really remember. Is it morning?”

She shakes her head. “Three in the. I was just wondering how you were. I was worrying about you down here. I missed you,” she smiles.

My eyelids are drooping persistently lower. “Missed you too,” I mumble tiredly.

“Tomorrow I’m going to find a spell to get rid of the smell,” she says. “We’re not wasting another night with you sleeping down here and me up there, it’s idiotic. I mean, we don’t exactly have much time. I don’t want to spend a single night apart for silly reasons like a smelly potion.”

“’Kay,” I mumble, succumbing to the inevitable closing of my eyes. I’m very, very tired. “Night night...”

She stoops to kiss my forehead. “Goodnight.”

* * *

 “Ginny, I don’t see what you recasting your ridiculous teenage fantasies as dreams in an essentially utterly fictitious narrative of our early relationship can possibly have to do with whatever it is that Neville has asked you to do.”

“Nothing at all,” I say. “But I thought you might find it funny.”

“You know,” she says, “I saw Neville today.”

“Did you?”

“I asked him if he’d asked you to do anything recently. He said he hadn’t, but he seemed pretty shifty about it.”

“Well, he’s a pretty shifty guy.”

Seeing I’m not going to be forthcoming, Hermione frowns. She holds up the manuscript in her hands, to which I’ve been steadily adding pages as I churn them out. She’s maybe halfway through what I’ve done so far, which would mean she’s about a third of the way through the planned book. “Fun though this may be, I hope you’re going to start approaching something resembling a point to all this soon.”

“Oh, yes. You’ll like the next chapter, Hermione. It’s about stuff that actually happened, for a start.”

“Oh? Like what?”

“About you going off with the Order to bring Harry to the Burrow, and me being terrified you wouldn’t come back-”

“The night we actually had sex for the first time.”

“Yes.”

“Anything else that actually happened that I can look forward to?” she asks.

“Yes,” I say. “You break my heart.”


	6. Chapter 6

**6**

“We’re going to get Harry tonight,” she tells me out in the fields.

Hermione and I sit on a snuck-out picnic blanket by the trunk of an old fallen tree, surrounded by tall waving stalks of wheat and sunflowers and pretty singing birds. I’m lying back flat on the soft ground, she’s sitting by my waist with her back to the mossy tree stump. My legs lie across her lap. Her hand rests casually, intimately, on my thigh.

“I know,” I say. “Mum told me.”

“You’ll have your boyfriend back,” she teases.

“I’m glad,” I say. “I’m getting quite bored of kissing you.”

“Mmm,” she says. She increases the pressure her fingertips are applying to the inside of my leg just a fraction, and my thigh muscle involuntarily tenses against her touch. “So, what will you do if he starts making lovey-dovey eyes at you?”

“Jealous?” I probe.

“Me, jealous?” she laughs. “That would make a change. You’re the one who’s glaring daggers at me every time I so much as say a word to your brother.”

“You touched his arm yesterday at dinner.”

“I was reaching for the water jug.”

“Well, don’t. Ask me to pass it to you.”

“I’m starting to see why so many boys break up with you, Ginny. Is there anyone I _am_ allowed to touch, may I ask?”

“No.” I prop myself up on my elbows to face her, smile playfully. “You’re mine, Hermione Granger. All mine.”

She smiles back.

 

“You can have my permission to kiss Harry, if you like,” she says. “I won’t mind.”

We’ve lapsed into a lazy late-afternoon silence, undeclared but peacefully mutual – her with her nose deep in a book, me staring up at the sky picking out patterns and shapes in the passing clouds – when she nudges me suddenly with the heel of her foot. It takes a moment for the cogs in my brain to whir back into action to process her words.

For a second I try to envisage the prospect – of seeing Harry again, kissing him again. Feelings long shoved away deep down within me half-stir, flop feebly like a fish that’s been out of water too long. There is still a part of me, I think, that wants to be with him, that’s attracted to him, that would enjoy kissing him again – but a larger, louder part of me points out how vague and featureless his face seems in my mind’s eye – points out how he slips away and Hermione slips back in.

“ _I_ will be making sure to keep Harry at a respectable distance,” I tell her. “Firmly out of kissing proximity. I’m a kissing-one-person-at-a-time kind of girl. And I’m kissing you at the moment, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

“I had, actually.”

“If he makes any unwanted advances towards me,” I add, “I shall expect you to defend my honour.”

“What am I meant to do?” she asks.

“Challenge him to a duel,” I suggest.

“God, imagine the look on his face.”

“And,” I continue, “I most certainly do _not_ give you permission to kiss Ron. In fact, I forbid it.”

“Yes, you’ve claimed me as your own. I’ve gathered that.”

“I haven’t _claimed_ you. I just don’t want you kissing anyone else while _I_ want to kiss you.”

She trails her hand casually up and down across the skin of my forearm. “And how long do you envisage your wanting to kiss me continuing? Just so I know when I’ll be allowed to reach for objects on the dinner table again.”

“Not sure,” I shrug. “I quite like kissing you, I doubt I’ll get bored of it before you leave.”

With that slipped-out mention of the L-word I lie back on the sun-warmed blanket, close my eyes, watch little orange lights dance across the insides of my eyelids for a while, knowing full well I’ve been an idiot and accidentally broached the forbidden topic and so any second now-

“Harry won’t want to stay here long,” I hear her say. “We’ll be leaving within a few days, I imagine.”

“Mmm,” I say without opening my eyes. I know all this. I’ve processed the fatally, fundamentally short-term nature of mine and Hermione’s dalliance; I’ve accepted in my heart the alarmingly complete separation awaiting us once she, Ron and Harry depart on their mysterious quest. They’re not staying at the Burrow for the rest of the summer. They’re certainly not going back to Hogwarts when I do at the start of September. Probably, they’ll be totally out of contact. Hell, I might never see any of them ever again. So, I’ve decided to just try and enjoy what little time I have left with Hermione, with my brother, with Harry. Enjoying the time you have is somewhat difficult with a cold lump of dread ever-present in the pit of your stomach, but I’m just about managing.

She prods me into opening my eyes with a poke in the belly. “Do you think you’ll see other people,” she asks, “when you’re back at Hogwarts?”

“Unless Invisibility Cloaks have come massively back into fashion, yeah.”

“Ha-ha.” She makes to poke me again, but I grab at her hand to intercept the blow. A heated bout of play-wrestling ensues, until we topple together to the blankets with our arms locked around each other’s waists. I wrap my legs around hers and come up on top of her, pinning her arms back by her sides.

“You won’t outmanoeuvre me, Granger,” I say, a little out of breath. “You’re tough to push over, but I grew up with six brothers. Apologise for poking me.”

“Sorry,” she says, and I magnanimously release her hands. “Now will you answer my question? You know what I meant.”

“You mean, will I find myself a nice new boyfriend when I go back to school?”

“Or girlfriend,” she says.

A heavy pause hangs between us then, as we both realise that that’s the first time either of us has floated the G-word. It seems to hover in the air between us, challenging us to savour its tang.

“The headmaster was murdered a few months ago,” I say finally. “I don’t think romance is going to be exactly thick in the air.”

She parts my hanging hair out of my eyes with a finger, traces the curve of my jaw down to the neck of my t-shirt. She hooks her finger inside the fabric, tugs slightly. “You should try and have fun,” she murmurs. “I worry about you, Ginny, I don’t want you to be – well...”

“Sitting all alone in my Hogwarts four-poster thinking about these few days and nights?”

“You do seem quite smitten with me,” she points out.

“Don’t worry about me, Hermione,” I tell her. “This – whatever it is, however the bloody hell it happened – has been fun. Really fun. But I’ve always known there’s a time limit. You’ve got more important things to be doing than rolling around in bushes with me. I’ll be fine. Worry about yourself. I do.”

She looks unconvinced, so I kiss her hard before she can voice any further doubts. We have to enjoy the time we have, I remind myself.

 

“We’ll have to get back soon,” she says. The light is fading, and the Burrow is calling.

I roll suddenly within Hermione’s embrace to face her. “Would you not go if I asked you to?”

Six inches away from me across the blankets, she blinks. “Not go where?”

“With the Order, on this thing to bring Harry back. With Harry, wherever it is that you’re going. Would you stay with me if I asked you to?”

“Ginny, what’s brought this on? Why are you asking me this?”

“Because I’m worried about you,” I say. “Terrified, actually.”

“I have to go, Ginny-”

“I know you _have_ to go. I’m not asking you to stay, I’m not. I know everybody has to do things they don’t want to do, shouldn’t have to do, because the world is so messed up. I just asked, _if_ I asked you to stay what would you do.” I smile at her. “I know you’d say no. You wouldn’t stay.”

“I might,” she offers feebly.

“No, you wouldn’t.”

“I have really enjoyed this past while, Ginny-”

“Yes, but you still wouldn’t stay.” I’m grinning now, like a madwoman. “You’d do the right thing. You’d leave. I guess I would too, if I had to go away for reasons like why you have to go away and you asked me to stay. We’re too noble, you and I, that’s our problem. If only we were worse people.”

She stares at me for a long time, lips pursed together in a manner eerily reminiscent of my mother. “You’re thinking too much,” she says finally. “Worrying too much.” She kisses my nose, then my forehead. She cradles her hand around the back of my head and eases my face into the pleasant-smelling warmth of her neck. “Stop it,” she murmurs in my ear. “I forbid it. Just lie here and don’t think or worry about anything. We can stay here a few more minutes, we won’t be missed.”

 

Then that night there’s the goodbyes, the agonising wait, the drip-drip-drip arrivals, running to hug her, wanting to kiss her so so much, her easing me gently off of her before watching eyes turn suspicious, but of course no one’s watching, no one cares, people are dead and there’s blood all over the living room floor and-

It’s dark in my bedroom. It’s the middle of the night, that’s why it’s dark. I can’t sleep, or I’ve just woken. I’m not quite sure. It’s three in the morning according to my bedside clock. The hands on the clockface glow in the dark slightly, enough to read the time by even on a sliver-of-a-moon night like this one. I lie in Hermione’s arms, the older girl spooning me protectively. Her grip on me is tight even in deepest sleep. Tentatively, I extricate myself from it to turn and watch her for a while. I let the sound of her snuffling breathing wash over me, marvel at how peaceful and intelligent and beautiful she looks. In the radioplays Dad listens to on the wireless characters sometimes talk to people in their sleep, or when they think the person they’re talking to is so tired that they won’t remember a thing they tell them. They’ll say things they wouldn’t dare to in the daylight.

“I love you,” I tell Hermione then.

 

“Want to dance?” she asks me.

Startled from my melancholy, I look up from my dinner plate at her. The air is full of dancing music, conversation, laughter. The ceiling above her head is a rippling golden canopy. It’s the big day, the wedding day. The ceremony has been and gone – now, it’s time for dinner and dancing. The latter will most likely continue into the small hours of the night. I should be as excited and cheery and carefree as anyone else, but instead I’m sitting slumped moodily in my chair at a table in a dusty far-flung corner of the tent. I’m flanked in my seat by a pair of grey old great-aunts who are engaged in a lively conversation across me about different types of garden fertiliser. I’ve been toying with my soup for fifteen minutes. The cold knot of fear in my stomach – the one that whispers, _Hermione and you shall soon be parted –_ has been growing all day. Hardening, like a tumour. It’s odd, I found myself thinking as I stared into the depths of my soup – so many people I love place themselves in mortal danger on a daily basis, and I cope, but when you’re _in_ love with someone – God, isn’t it so much worse.

Hermione’s face is happy and flushed from dancing. I stand and take her by the wrist to pull her a little away from the table. “Don’t you think it might arouse suspicions?” I ask in a low voice.

“Of course not,” she says. “No one will bat an eyelid. Look,” she points, “there’s Fleur’s little sister Gabrielle dancing with another Veela girl. It’ll be fine!” She ignores my continued reluctance, taking my cold hand in her warm and slightly sweaty one to lead me to the dancefloor. She places one hand on my waist, takes my hand high in her other. “Shall I lead?”

We amble through a series of short little movements, gradually increasing in fluidity. The knot in my stomach begins to ease, my back de-stiffens, the shooting anxious tingles rushing across my skin fade. As Hermione whirls me through a quick turn I see Luna, and wave at her; the dance brings us next to Bill and Fleur, and Fleur laughs kindly when she sees us and says something to Bill about us showing up the boys. Then we move on, Hermione whisking me away. Every time the movements of the dance bring Hermione and I close together I melt, every time it draws us apart I freeze – and then what feels like mere moments later the music stops, and it’s over.

“That was good,” Hermione says.

“You were good,” I correct her. “You must practice with Crookshanks.”

“Every day,” she laughs. The music strikes back up and the dancers around us swing back into action. I make to follow them, want to follow them, but Hermione pulls away from me. “Sorry, Ginny, my feet are killing me. I couldn’t dance another step. Let’s go get a drink or something.”

She turns to move away towards the edge of the dancefloor, and I watch her go. She takes one step, two steps, three steps, four – but then she turns suddenly and recrosses the distance between us. She leans close to me, her expression strange. “Ginny,” she says quietly, “I – I...”

“You love me?” I offer.

She laughs. “No. I was just trying to say that I’ve really enjoyed this past week.” She looks around quickly, then darts in to kiss my cheek. “I’ve just thought, I really need to go and talk to Harry. You won’t mind if I leave you for five minutes, right? We’ll dance again later, there’s plenty of time. Right?”

“Right,” I echo as she walks away.

* * *

“Oh, poor Ginny. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be,” I tell her cheerily. “You’ve just finished the first act.”

“I have? Of which there are...”

“Three. I’ve just finished writing act two, actually.”

“Really?”

“Really.” I snap the notebook in which I’ve been hurriedly scrawling for the past two hours shut to accentuate my point. “So you can get on with reading it without pausing to offer me your commentary every five seconds, dear. I don’t want to hear another word out of you on the subject until you’ve finished it.”

“Mmm,” she says.

I half-turn on the bench to follow her gaze to Rose, watch our daughter go down a playground slide belly-first and land safely on the soft rubber ground. We sit in a park in the bright late-August sunlight, the air full of the loud and varied sounds that overly-excited children make.

I feel a sudden impulse to muse coming on. I decide to properly prepare by topping up my glass of wine. “Do you ever think about how differently things might have gone?” I ask her.

“Mmm?”

“Back when we were teenagers,” I say. “Before you and I got together. For a while it seemed so destined that I was going to end up with Harry and you were going to end up with Ron. That once our pesky little Voldemort problem was out of the way we were all going to live happily ever after and meet up in parks for picnics and all our kids would be friends and all of that.”

She smiles. “That doesn’t sound too different to our present reality.”

“Well, exactly. That’s what I’m saying.” I spread my hands across the table we sit at to indicate Harry and Ron’s vacated place-settings. “It’s strange, isn’t it – how we’re all still here, still the best of friends?”

“I don’t think it’s strange,” she says. “We’ve been friends since we were eleven. A little romantic realignment was never going to change that.”

“But it’s like our getting together didn’t change anything at all,” I say.

“I guess it didn’t,” she says.

I take a deep sip of wine. “Do you think anything might have gone differently that year, if we hadn’t gotten together that summer at the Burrow?”

“You mean, do I think we would have still managed to stop Voldemort if you and I hadn’t kissed a few times before I went off Horcrux-hunting?”

“I’m serious,” I say.

She gives it a little thought, her eyes flitting back and forth from my face to her view over my shoulder of Rose on the playground behind me and back. “No, I don’t think anything would have really changed that year. We barely did anything that summer, despite-” she holds up the manuscript- “your claims to the contrary. I don’t think our failing to share a few furtive kisses in the night would have affected the Horcrux hunt in any meaningful way. Much as I’d like to claim it, Ginny, I don’t think our falling in love saved the world.”

“But if we _hadn’t_ fallen in love – wouldn’t you have behaved differently, when you were away with Harry and Ron looking for Horcruxes? Wouldn’t it have butterfly-effected things?”

“No, I don’t think much would have changed that year at all. It would all have played out the same way, and then I’d have married Ron and you’d have married Harry and you’d have three black-haired children with poor eyesight.”

“You’re probably right,” I sigh.

“Look,” she says, “Ron’s coming back over.” She folds the manuscript away carefully into her bag. “Goodness, he’s covered in mud.”

“These kids are going to kill me,” he complains. Ron appears at my right shoulder, muddied from head to toe in his efforts playing goalkeeper for a swarm of football-playing children. Face flushed maroon with exertion, he levers his tall frame with some effort into a seat on the bench next to me. The picnic table is one of those awkward constructions where you have to climb in in stages, and God help you once you’re in if you decide you want to get back out. “Afternoon, ladies.”

Hermione hands him a plastic cup of lemonade. “Bottoms up.”

He gulps it down gratefully, then turns to squint one-eyed at the playground behind us. “Where’s Harry disappeared off to?”

“He’s on swing duty,” Hermione says. “You’ve got a big clump of dirt on your eyepatch, you know, Ron – here, let me-”

She reaches across to wipe it off. “Thanks,” he says. “So, what were you two gossiping about?”

“We were wondering what might have happened if we hadn’t gotten together when we did,” I say. “What might have changed that year.”

He shrugs, tugs at the strap of his patch to adjust it a millimetre or two. “Nothing, I bet.”

“That’s what we figured,” Hermione says.

 

After a few minutes and a few more cups of lemonade, Ron’s face is starting to slowly de-redden towards a more normal human hue. He’s regained enough strength to turn back towards the football game he so recently fled and gesticulate at one of his brood, a red-haired boy who stops abruptly in mid-sprint. “Five more minutes!” Ron yells over. The boy cups his ear to indicate that he has not heard. “Five more – _five –_ oh, forget it.” Ron turns back to us, shaking his head. His son shrugs aloofly and reenters play.

“He’s not the brightest child,” Ron says. “Once he asked me, if I was his dad how come he didn’t only have one eye too.”

In the meantime, Harry too has returned to us. “Hello,” he says as he clambers onto a seat on the bench beside Hermione. His wife remains on the far side of the playground, remonstrating with a young boy the spitting image of his father for playing too roughly with Rose. “Sorry,” he adds to Hermione and I. “He gave Rose a bit of a grazed knee pushing her too fast on the swings.”

“It’s fine,” I say. “He’s still got a bump on his forehead from Rose throwing a Quaffle at him too hard, hasn’t he? He’s just getting even.”

“Luckily they’ll all be back off to Hogwarts soon,” Ron says, to general smiles and clinking of glasses. “Always my favourite two weeks of the year, the first two weeks of September. Anyone got special plans?”

Hermione and I shrug, but Harry perks up. “We’re going to stay at the Woolesbury for a weekend,” he offers.

Ron looks incredulous. “That old dump is still open? Why’re you going there?”

“Old time’s sake,” Harry shrugs. “It’s got new owners, apparently. They’ve redecorated, it’s meant to be alright.”

“I know you two met there and all, but hiding out there from old Voldy was the single most tedious month of my life. It’d take some amount of bloody redecoration to get _me_ back there.” Ron shudders. “I still wake up sometimes with the taste of that porridge they used to serve at breakfast in my mouth.”

“You must be getting nostalgic in your old age, Harry,” I say. “Visiting old haunts, retracing past glories...”

“Not exactly,” he says. “Sarah’s from there, after all. She’ll get a chance to catch up with friends, family...”

“You’ll be taking her down into the Ministry next,” I continue, “showing her the exact spot where you killed Voldemort. Running her through it blow-by-blow.”

“No I won’t,” he says defensively. “You can’t see where it happened, anyway, they restructured the whole floor years ago to stop people trying to visit the spot or whatever. Oh, anyway," he smiles slightly, "speaking of the Ministry and Voldemort – I saw Malfoy the other day at work.”

“Was he looking pale?” Ron jokes. Hermione flashes him a _don’t-be-mean_ look across the table.

“He just seemed a bit bored,” Harry says.

“He wants to find a nice old castle or something to haunt,” Ron says. “Anything to stop him finding the time to jump out through walls at me in the shop, the bastard. He does it near enough every week.”

“Don’t call him a bastard,” Hermione chides, “he did save us all.”

“At what point do you stop having to be nice and understanding and tactful to someone just because they’re dead?” Ron demands. “It’s been twenty years, I’d love to tell him I hate his guts again.”

“He didn’t have to come back as a ghost when Voldemort killed him,” Hermione goes on, “but he did, to tell us where the last Horcrux was. He gave up – well, gave up moving _on_ and whatever that entails to do that. I think he’s allowed to be a bit bored.”

“He’s turning away all our customers,” Ron says flatly. “I hope a basilisk gets him.”

 

That night, when I tuck Rose into bed and go back downstairs, I find Hermione in an armchair in the living room fingering the new pages I handed her earlier. My handwriting is terrible, so luckily for her it’s an enchanted notebook I’ve been writing in – it turns my speediest messiest scribbles instantly into neatly typed and formatted wordage. “I’m quite excited to start these,” she says. “What’s this second act about?”

“It’s a love story,” I tell her.


	7. Chapter 7

**7**

I woke alone.

There was silence all through the house, and the air was oddly chill. I lay in bed for a while wondering whether even this unseasonably cool morning might somehow be Voldemort’s doing, as if he had begun to bend even the weather to his will. Then I thought maybe the Death Eaters had come back, that the rest of my family was already dead downstairs and now they were creeping up the stairs for me – but then I heard Mum clattering pots and pans downstairs, and I realised that that was not the case. I got out of bed and padded across to the window. The day outside was as grey and bleak as only a British summer day could be. I refused to rule out the first of my theories.

Now that the clutter caused like a natural law of the universe by two girls living together in such a close space was gone, my room seemed bare and desolate – stripped, as it might if all the wallpaper had been torn off. Everywhere I saw empty spaces where Hermione’s things had been, or possessions of mine she had moved to stupid wrong places back in their proper right ones. My bed in particular looked jarringly bereft, sheets and pillows tugged selfishly into a cocoon-for-one along the indent in the mattress left by my body.

Over the past dozen days Hermione’s presence had been fading from my bedroom, slowly and then faster. I hated it. I hated that those few days with her – when an unknown mad force seemed to possess us, driving us together with frightening intensity – were over. I hated knowing that if-stroke-when we saw each other again she would most likely have snapped out of whatever temporary insanity had overcome her; that those days would be downplayed, chalked up to an admixture of the chaotic and terrifying times we were living in and teenage hormones, made a private joke to be recalled once a decade or so.

But there was no point moping about it, so I didn’t. When I saw Hermione again I could address my feelings for her. Until then, I would just have to live with them.

 

My schoolfriend Jen was visiting that day. As we sat on my bed we were disturbed suddenly by a sharp tapping at the window. An owl unfamiliar to me stood there. “Oh,” Jen said, “Maddy’s written to you!”

“Who?” I asked blankly.

“Maddy Oakley,” she said as if that were sufficient explanation. Oakley was a girl in our year. Jen hung out with her, but I didn’t. I barely knew her.

I let the owl inside. It had a letter for me, which I read quickly. “She wants to come here and play Quidditch with me,” I said. “Jen, why does she want to come here and play Quidditch with me?”

“Because you asked her to come here and play Quidditch with you.”

“I most certainly did not,” I said.

Five minutes later we had established that I most certainly had, on the Hogwarts Express at the start of the summer. I gave the owl a treat and turned back to Jen, still holding Oakley’s letter. “Do I really have to have her over?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said.

 

“Hi,” Oakley said.

“Hi,” I said.

She stepped forwards out of the kitchen fireplace. It’s always startling to see someone for the first time outside of school, isn’t it, removed from that familiar context. Oakley had her broomstick tucked underneath her arm and a rucksack slung over her other shoulder. She wore a purple sweater and faded jeans, and her hair seemed a little longer and wilder than I half-remembered from Charms classes. It was bleached a little, too, by the summer sun.

Despite all that happened later, I still have that image of her on that morning frozen in my mind. Of course, in that moment I wasn’t thinking about how tall or tanned or handsome she looked or anything like that. My heart was Hermione’s and my head still was too. I had barely begun to process _that_ attraction, never mind wonder whether I might be attracted to other girls. But in some deep folded recess of my brain the chemicals had started firing, I don’t doubt that now. I used to think my dalliance with Oakley only happened because of her crush on me, but now I don’t think you can truly form a proper crush on someone unless you’ve felt some reciprocating spark. Unconsciously I watched the way she moved – already some deep-down part of me wanted to spend more time with her, get closer to her, possess her.

All my conscious mind was concerned with that morning, however, was navigating the awkward early stages of friendship-forming. “Thanks for having me over,” she said. “I’m sure you totally forgot ever inviting me.”

“Of course not,” I assured her. “Shall we head out, then?”

“Lead the way,” she said.

 

The third time Oakley came round it was raining, and Mum was in the kitchen too when she appeared in the fireplace in a puff of green flame. “Oh, hello,” Oakley said to her, “you must be Ginny’s sister...”

Mum invited her to stay for dinner.

We persevered out in the rain for a spirit-sapping hour before conceding defeat. Oakley made noises about going home, but I reminded her that she had a dinner reservation and brought her up to my room.

I was standing at the window towelling my hair, idly watching raindrops battering against the glass, when I realised I had left some somewhat compromising drawings out on my desk. I hung my towel around my neck and set to surreptitiously tidying them away. “I don’t know why we’re even bothering,” Oakley said behind me. “You really think they’re going to let us play Quidditch at school next year?”

I turned, and almost jumped. Oakley was sitting on the edge of my bed drying herself with a towel she had pulled out of her rucksack. Not three weeks earlier Hermione had come in from the rain and sat in that exact same spot. I could practically see her sitting there, a guilty apparition. Distracted, I struggled to grasp Oakley’s meaning for a moment. “Oh,” I offered feebly, “they might...”

“Never mind I suppose,” she sighed. “I mean it’s a shame for you, because you’re actually good. But it’s probably for the betterment of the sport that my ignominious career will come to an end.” She pulled off her wet sweater, then her t-shirt, exposing a thin unblemished torso. Raking around in her bag for a fresh shirt, she glanced up at me. Mistaking my Hermione-induced staring, she raised her eyebrows.

I scrambled for some reason to be gawping that didn’t involve a brief positional convergence with a past lesbian lover. “You’ve got a big bruise on your shoulder,” I said.

“Oh, yeah.” She smiled. “Wasn’t you, don’t worry. You only bruise my ego when you’re putting goal after goal past me out there. I tripped at home.”

“Looks sore,” I said.

“It’s not too bad,” she shrugged. She tugged on a fresh shirt, then stretched her arms out lazily and reclined back on my bed. Hermione’s shade seemed to follow her every movement. I turned back to my desk to finish putting away my drawings, but before I knew it Oakley had come up behind me and placed a hand casually on my shoulder. She looked past me to the desk. “What’re you up to?" she asked. "Oh, are these drawings? Did you do these? I mean obviously you did, they’re on your desk, but – they’re really good! They’re all of … a girl?”

“I’m glad you can tell,” I said. She was standing very close to me, her leg jostling against mine. “My first attempts looked more like ostriches.”

Oakley leaned past me to peer closer. “Who is she?”

“No one,” I said. “Just a face from an old annual. I’m just practising.”

“These are really good,” she said again. “You’re a hundred times better than me, anyway. I wish I was good at that sort of thing. I mean I think I _could_ be good, but I didn’t grow up doing it, you know?” She raised one of the pencil portraits to study it more closely. “She’s pretty. I like the way you sort of idealise her, the way you’re looking up at her and the way her head is turned...”

Her face was flushed and happy and quite, quite close to mine. It was then, I think, that I realised she fancied me. “It’s no one,” I said again.

Luckily she hadn’t seen the drawings I kept in my desk drawer.

 

“I guess I’ll see you at school,” I said.

Oakley stood in front of the Burrow’s kitchen fireplace, about to depart. Behind her the green flames were already roaring. “I actually have to go shopping to get some stuff for school tomorrow,” she said. “Want to come?”

“Sure,” I said. “I’m not doing anything.”

“Cool. See you at mine. Eleven?”

“Sounds good,” I said.

She smiled, and gave a little wave of goodbye, then turned and stepped into the fire.

So, I thought, she fancied me. Well, I didn’t fancy her. I fancied Hermione. I would just have to keep Oakley at a respectable distance from now on. It would be difficult – I had realised Oakley spent practically every moment we were together chasing the electric thrill of further bodily contact with Ginevra Molly Weasley – but I thought I could manage it. I would have to. Hermione was the girl for me, and until I finally saw her again and she delivered the inevitable news that for her I had been a silly little mistake I was not going to get involved with anyone else – certainly not Oakley. I mean – _Oakley?_

* * *

“So,” Hermione says, “you cheated on me.”

“I did not,” I insist.

“How long was it before you two kissed?”

“Not until January.”

She raises her eyebrows. “I’m impressed, actually.”

“We weren’t in a relationship, Hermione, you can’t call it cheating.”

“You can’t call it faithful-ing. I never fondled _anyone_ while I was away, you know.” I just shrug and spin around lazily in my desk chair in response. We’re back in my little office at the back of the house. It’s not warm enough for lemonade so we sip coffees. “I think I remember Oakley,” she goes on. “Pretty girl. You know, you never call my torso thin or unblemished.”

“I call you beautiful all the time. I never call her beautiful.”

“I’ll hold you to that,” she says. “So, when do I come back in? I’d gotten almost accustomed to reading your warped version of me.”

“Soon,” I promise.

* * *

On the first day of school I didn’t see Oakley until the Great Hall. She had made noises about meeting at Kings Cross, getting a compartment together, but I wasn’t sure how or when I would be getting to the station so in the end we agreed just to see each other when we saw each other. Perhaps in Kings Cross I found myself a little anticipatory, glancing around wondering whether she might suddenly appear, but on the platform I met some of my fellow Dumbledore’s Army alumni and from then on I pretty much forgot about her.

It wasn’t until I was taking a seat at the Gryffindor table, then, that I cast an explorative glance around the hall and landed on her. She was sitting two tables across, down by the room’s far end. She was quite far away, but her head was turned in my direction and I thought she stiffened slightly when she saw me see her. She had watched me enter, I thought. We looked at each other through a sea of bobbing heads for a moment before I turned away.

During the meal I found my eyes straying back to her a few times. She looked different in schoolclothes, her hair primly cut, the lean angles of her body disguised by baggy robes. I saw her laugh at the jokes of friends I didn’t know and she’d never mentioned. I was sure she was stealing glances too, probably more than I was, but she was more careful now and I didn’t catch her again. She was sitting far from the hall exit, I close to it, and when the time came to file out of the hall towards common rooms there were quickly hundreds of students between us. I didn’t wait for her.

I managed to avoid her until Transfiguration class last thing on Wednesday. Our friendship had formed on the rhythms of summer, on spending long lazy days together doing nothing then making plans to do it all again soon, but now that initial excited haze had dissipated I found myself reviewing the situation with a little more detachment. If she really fancied me like I thought, nothing good could come of it. I was waiting for Hermione, and I almost took Oakley’s interest in me as something of an affront – couldn’t she see I was taken? In fact, I was incubating half-formed notions of cutting Oakley out entirely.

But when I stepped through the classroom doorway that afternoon I paused. I had last seen her at breakfast, eating cereal in what I thought was a rather morose manner. Now she was inside the classroom, sitting alone near the back. Her face was in quarter profile from where I stood, and bathed in orange afternoon light. I hesitated a moment – I had other friends in that class, other options. Then I went and sat beside Oakley. “Hi,” I said.

 

After we left the classroom we paused out in the corridor. Classes were done for the day, and it was a left turn to my common room and a right turn to hers. “Want to go to the library?” she asked.

“Sure,” I said.

We took seats opposite one another, the table between us so broad that if we both stretched out our arms ahead of us our hands would only just have met in the middle. “It’s a bit of a change for us, isn’t it,” she was saying. “I think we’re going to simultaneously see more and less of one another.”

“We’ll see each other plenty,” I assured her. “I mean, I need you to help me pass Transfiguration.”

* * *

 I lean over the back of Hermione’s armchair. “How far through are you?”

“It’s just turned January,” she says, and I make a face. “Ginny, I can only read so fast.” She waggles the manuscript she holds indicatively. “There’s a lot for me to get through.”

“I could have streamlined a little in places,” I admit.

“It does get a little repetitive. You stare at her, she stares at you, you find flimsy excuses to touch one another’s legs under the table in class, you go away to pine over me for a bit and leave her alone to pine over you, you two sit together in the library in half-lit secluded corners while it rains atmospherically outside and never dare to broach a word about what’s happening between you … and then the next day begins.”

“That about sums it up,” I concur. “We’re much better communicators, you and I.”

“We were, until you decided that the best manner in which to communicate something significant to your spouse was to write thirty thousand words about it rather than just telling her. I hope this isn’t going to become a pattern, Ginny. I don’t want you writing me a trilogy because you forgot to buy milk.”

“No,” I agree, “never again. This really was a very stupid way of doing things, now that I come to think about it.” I rest my chin on her shoulder and look down at the manuscript in her lap. “What’s happening at the moment?”

“You’re visiting her over the Christmas break. You two are having a  _sleepover_.”

“Ah,” I say, “you’ve almost reached the ten-page sex scene.”

“Very droll. Did you two, ever?”

“No,” I say.

Hermione turns the page, and I read a few paragraphs over her shoulder.

* * *

 wrapped up warm in hats and scarves and thick coats and went out. She took me to a Muggle fair near her home. From a distance the fair seemed an island of light and life in the early winter night, but when we got inside it was mostly empty and there were more ride attendants and food-hawkers than fairgoers.

Compared to any wizarding fair a Muggle one was going to seem a terrible substitute, but we managed to have a fairly enjoyable evening with the reindeer and twirling pumpkin rides and a laughable Muggle version of a haunted house (not even any real ghosts!). When the night turned too cold for us we meandered back through the fairground towards the exit.

“Oh, look,” Oakley said suddenly. She pointed.

I dutifully followed the direction of her gloved finger to a small empty patch of frozen ground in between two shooting-gallery attractions, but failed to see anything immediately astounding. “What?” I asked.

“There used to be a fortune-teller there,” she said. “I talked to her once.”

I gave her a funny look. “You believe in that sort of stuff?”

She shrugged. “Not normally,” she said.

As we walked on, our footsteps crunching and crackling on the light layer of snow covering the gravel ground, Oakley kept glancing back over her shoulder at the old empty spot she had indicated. Puzzled by her perturbation, I nudged her. “I assume she told you that you would meet an incredibly attractive red-haired woman?”

“Yeah, and only two years later I met your mum. No, it actually scared the shit out of me what she told me. I still think about it.”

“When was this?” I asked her.

“Like I said, a couple of years ago.”

“God,” I laughed, “I thought it would have at least been when you were like five or something! A Muggle fortune-teller!”

“She was really accurate, Ginny!” Oakley protested. “Who says she was a Muggle, really? She guessed all sorts of stuff about me right. My birthday, what my favourite subject at school was, what I wanted to be when I was older. I asked her if I’d make the Quidditch team and she said I would.”

“You asked a Muggle about Quidditch?”

“No, of course not. I was like, ‘there’s this sports team at my school I want to get into next year. Will I?’ And she croaked, ‘yes, my dear, you will play for two disappointing seasons before maniacs take over the school and ban the sport entirely.’”

“What else did she say, then?”

Oakley looked hesitant. She put her hands into her pockets and took them out again, half-turned away from me and then turned back. “Well

* * *

 Hermione turns the page and I lose my place. “Well,” she comments to me over her shoulder, “this all seems fantastically irrelevant. Will you be reading each other’s tea-leaves in the next chapter?”

“This is actually Oakley’s central character moment,” I inform her.

“I’m sure,” she says skeptically.

"That was the night we had our first kiss, too."

"I can't wait to read about it."

I lean past her to take the manuscript and check for myself just how much more she has to get through, then tut disapprovingly.

“God,” she says, “it’s like being back at school.”

“You loved school.”

“It’s just an expression.”

“Well, if this is like school then I guess you’ve got homework.” I drop the pages back into her lap. “You’ll have to finish tonight. We’re out of time.”

“Ginny,  _why_?”

“A fate hangs in the balance,” is all I enigmatically offer.

This earns me a dirty look from her. “Ginny, if I find out there isn’t a good reason for all of this I think I may murder you.”

“There is a good reason,” I assure her. “I mean, it’s nothing important in the grand scheme of things and it won’t affect us or anyone we know in the slightest one way or the other – but I think there is a good reason. I hope you’ll be able to persuade her, I know I’m not going to be able to.”

“I will get you back someday for all this mystery,” she promises.

“Go through to the office,” I tell her. “Read in there. I’ll keep Rose busy. If you’re getting near the end before I put her to bed, wait for me.”

“How will I know if I’m getting near the end?” she asks.

“It’ll be springtime,” I say.

Hermione sighs, and – with more muttered promises to maim or murder me if this all happens to be some cruel obscure joke I’m playing on her – troops off towards the little office at the back of the house to churn through the rest of the manuscript. I’m left on daughter duties. Before long Rose comes downstairs enquiring after dinner, and afterwards she watches television in the living room. I zone out on the couch beside her.

After I put Rose to bed I go back downstairs and pour two glasses of wine. I carry them along the little corridor that leads off from the kitchen, slip inside the lamplit office and close the door quietly behind me. Hermione glances up when I enter. “I think I’m nearly finished,” she says. I set a glass down before her and read over her shoulder.

* * *

 “See you after Easter,” Neville said.

“Yeah,” I said, “see you.”

We stood there amongst the Hogsmeade Station crowds for a moment before he seemed to see something over my shoulder and started turning away. “I’ll leave you two alone,” he said as I felt Maddy’s light touch on my back.

She stepped up from behind me lugging her heavy suitcase, then squinted after Neville. “Do you think he knows something? Longbottom?”

“No,” I said, “he just thinks we’re friends. It’s just that he likes to talk about his secret club all the time and he can’t with you around. He’ll be off to find Seamus Finnigan or someone, someone he can talk shop with. We’re masters of deception, you and I.” In the narrow gap between our bodies, I entwined her fingers into mine. “Let’s get a compartment,” I said.

* * *

 “Ah,” Hermione interrupts, “now it’s starting to get into territory where I know what’s going to happen. This is good, it’s like when you’re rereading a book and halfway through you finally start to remember the plot. At Platform 9 & ¾ your Dad whisks you straight off to your Aunt Muriel’s, because your family is going into hiding. So, after then you won’t see Oakley again until – well, I don’t know. But not until after-”

“Not until after you triumphantly return upon the scene,” I finish.

 

The shadows lengthen and the sky outside the windows turns orange-red-purple-black and the clock hand turns round, eight, nine, ten, eleven, and still turning relentlessly on. Hermione works methodically through the manuscript she must finish before tomorrow, and I hover behind her and read over her shoulder and from time to time rub supportively at her tired muscles.

First we encounter mine and Oakley’s parting at Kings Cross. Our farewell was brief – carelessly, stupidly, obliviously, tragically so. There was only a fleeting little touch of hands as she stepped away from me towards her parents to signify any sort of connection deeper than friendship between us: neither of us realising that the little private world we had been inhabiting together for the past few months was in the middle of ending, coming down around our ears; neither of us realising that that exact moment there was our last chance to halt the apocalyptic process in motion, to grasp the tearing-apart threads of our reality and tug them back together. Instead I just watched her go, then went to find my father. Oakley and I planned, happily, naively, cluelessly, to see each other every day over the Easter break. She would visit me and I would visit her. The weather was turning warmer again; we might even play Quidditch.

Then there was my dad picking me up at the platform; informing me that we wouldn’t be returning to the Burrow, that it wasn’t safe, that instead I would be joining the rest of my family in hiding at great-aunt Muriel’s; then there were the days and then weeks that slipped by in that old cramped draughty house. I was dragged sharply from mine and Oakley’s world back into the real one, where the conversations were of the Order of the Phoenix and Voldemort and Harry Potter rather than of books, magazines, music, likes, dislikes, hopes, fears. As time passed so did Oakley out of my mind. Now it was her who seemed impossibly far away and Hermione who seemed close – Hermione, whose name along with Harry and Ron’s seemed to be mentioned every day. I was mostly kept out of the loop about goings-on, and spent most of my time reading or playing boardgames with Muriel or up in the attic skipping and heaving medicine balls about to not much discernable effect, but even I knew something big was impending.

Then, it was months after I had seen Oakley last. I was lying in bed one night in the guest double my mother and I shared, staring at the ceiling and trying to ignore my mother’s snoring, when she came into my mind suddenly. Just an image of her, from the last time I had seen her – her glancing over her shoulder to wave to me before she disappeared through the platform barrier. Short dark hair and pale blue eyes, black jeans and a threadbare sweater. I hadn’t thought of her in weeks, I realised.

Then Harry and Ron and Hermione showed up one day, and everyone except me and Muriel went off to kill Voldemort, and yadda yadda yah. That’s where Hermione has gotten to in the manuscript, and there’s only a couple of chapters left to go.

* * *

 I woke to the news that Voldemort was dead.

Great-aunt Muriel and I sat up all night in her living room together waiting – for good news, for bad news, for them to return or for Death Eaters to batter in the back door. We had the wireless on and played cards, but our nerves were so shredded we barely noticed who won or lost each game. At about four in the morning I pulled my feet up onto the sofa and closed my eyes – just for a moment, you see, I could handle it, of course I wasn’t going to be stupid enough to fall  _asleep…_

I woke three hours later, at seven. I still remember exactly the physical sensation of waking that morning. It’s my strongest memory from that day, strangely – not learning Harry and Hermione and everyone in my family had somehow all survived, not seeing Hermione in a bed in a makeshift hospital tent in the Ministry Atrium with her entire right leg in a reparative cast, not us getting our first chance to talk in nine months, not being taken quietly aside by my dad to be told who hadn’t made it – no, not those, but the way I  _jerked_ awake that morning, my heart tight with terror. It was only after a few frenzied seconds looking about that I realised no one had came, nothing had happened, nothing had changed, it was still just me and Muriel alone in the big empty house. She was sleeping in a rocking chair beside me, snoring softly. I was hungry, I realised. How could I be hungry?

I stepped silently through into the kitchen. The kitchen curtains were open and early morning sunlight was streaming in, the brightness and warmth a relief as pure as quenching thirst after the suffocating dimness I had woken to in the living room

* * *

 “Ginny,” Hermione protests suddenly, “I can’t. I’m falling asleep.”

“No you’re not,” I say.

“Yes, I am. And you are too.”

It’s true. We lie in bed with the lights still on. It’s late, past one, and Hermione still has twenty pages to go. She’s done well. She has. She’s gotten through a lot. But she's hit the proverbial wall and I, waiting up supportively with her, have too.

“I really truly cannot read another word,” she says. “Please, please, please just tell me in the morning what happened with Oakley and what the point of all this is.”

I nod, too tired to argue. “Okay,” I say.

Hermione drops the manuscript off the side of the bed, and it hits the carpet with a thud of finality.

I reach across and turn out the bedroom light.

Once the lights are off I wriggle deeper underneath the covers and turn away from Hermione onto my side. Behind me I hear Hermione making similar motions. Her slight movements jiggle the mattress or twitch the covers as she too makes herself comfortable.

Perhaps a minute passes – sleep not far off for me, but just having retreated slightly in that annoying way it can when after putting it off you finally pursue it – before I feel Hermione snuggling up behind me. At first I just think she intends to spoon, as she moves her body into mine and slips her arm around my waist. Then she pulls my hair aside with her other hand and starts to trail kisses across my neck, and I realise she has more on her mind than falling asleep.

I work backwards into the curve of her body, thrilling at the sensation of our warm bodies pressing together. I turn my head like a preening bird to allow her roaming lips better access to my neck. Her hand moves under the hem of my pyjama shirt to my navel, then starts to stray lower. I issue a low pleasured moan, push yet further back into her crescent. As her lips reach a pulse point low on my neck, her fingers slide underneath the waistband of my pyjama bottoms. At this early stage of foreplay she does nothing more than trace a solitary finger down me, but her touch is still electrifying.

Keeping her hand between my legs, she climbs on top of me and straddles my hips. The lights are off and it’s so dark I can barely make out her features, but I stretch up to kiss her and find her lips as though guided by radar. I’d locked my arms around her back for balance, but I manage to free a hand – to caress at her face, run through her hair, feel clumsily through her nightgown at her chest. As we kiss her fingers unbutton my pyjama shirt. When I feel the cooler air on my chest, I wriggle the shirt off. For a moment then – noses touching, lips mere microns distant – we pause.

The manuscript version of me might have coyly said something like, “ _I thought you were tired.”_

“ _I am_ ,” the manuscript version of Hermione might have coyly replied, “ _tired of reading that bloody book, tired of reading about my wife and some other girl...”_

“ _So you’re claiming your property?_ ” I would tease.

“ _Mmm_ ,” she would murmur.

And later, in the deepest throes of passion, Hermione’s trite manuscript shade might have breathed something in my ear like, “ _Oakley never had you like this..._ ”

And I would moan deferentially, again a pathetically fawning fifteen year old under her ministrations, “ _no, never, only you, always only you..._ ”

And after my juddering orgasm she would lean close to me and whisper something like, “ _you’re mine, Ginevra Weasley, and don’t you forget it..._ ”

But the real versions of us don’t need to say a thing.


	8. Chapter 8

**8**

Last manuscript chapter, Hermione. You’re tired, I’m tired. We’ve ran out of time. It’s been fun but let’s get this over with, shall we?

We join our plucky young heroes – that is, you and I – back in the Burrow, back in my bedroom. It was a week or so after the battle at the Ministry. Now, as you may recall, there was rather a lot going on in the wizarding world during the formative year of our relationship. If it was an accurate retelling of the time I was trying to produce, a week after the battle people would be dead and people would be dying and people would be horribly injured and everything would be shock and grief and numbness and you a sole constant point of light in my life and me, I dare to hope, in yours – but that’s not what I’m trying to do, so I’m going to skip past all of that to the sunshine and roses. I only need to write about you and me and Madeleine, and I only _want_ to write about you and me and Madeleine, and so I only _am_ going to write about moo and yee and Madeleine.

Why, I hear you ask? What’s the point of all this? Well, I need to change Maddy’s mind about this insane fortune teller thing. Or, rather, I need _you_ to change her mind – because I’ve already tried and failed, and because you’re the smartest and most logical and most persuasive and most scary person I know. And so I wanted to try and show you that she was and still is a good, kind, clever person – and I also wanted to show you what it was like being with you, and what it was like being with her, and show you that it was never, ever even for the slightest moment a contest between you and her.

So, the last chapter was our long-awaited reunion. Me at your St. Mungo’s bedside, you with your leg up in that horrid cast the Healers said you’d have to wear for a month. You’ll have been happy, Hermione – a scene between you and me that actually factually happened pretty much just as I retold it. I hope you liked it. If you even get this far through the manuscript before we run out of time, that is. Thinking about it we probably definitely _will_ run out of time, won’t we? That means you won’t have read the last chapter and you won’t read this one either and I’ll have to half-arsedly summarise things for you in the car on the way to Madeleine’s… Oh well. I suppose you can finish reading the manuscript afterwards.

Anyway, back to the chapter. You were finally out of the sick bay. We brought you back to the Burrow, to continue your recuperation. The Healers said it might be weeks before you could get your cast off, be back to full mobility. They said I might have to help you get dressed and move about and stuff like that, and recommended you get lots of fresh air and plenty of bedrest. We thought that sounded just fine by us. We went up the stairs to my room together, you leaning more and more heavily on my shoulder, your hand digging more and more tightly into my side until it began to hurt but I didn’t mind. You collapsed onto my bed as soon as you were close enough, stretching out flat on your back and sighing and closing your eyes. I hovered uncertainly above you for a moment, unsure with what degree of fragility and careful distance you, my patient, needed to be treated – but then you looked up at me and laughed at my overcaution, and reached up and took my hand and tugged me down to lie beside you.

Mum came in then, as we lay back shoulder to shoulder on the bed with our hands half-held together between our pressed sides. A quick little knock at the door preceded her entry. The nightmarish year past had had the interesting effect of exhausting all capacity for fear or paranoia out of us. Rubbed thusly raw, we could accept one another so totally that in those days and weeks we found it rather difficult to remember that anyone else really existed. That shared feeling would recede slowly, but while it lasted I think it was our purest period of happiness (though, there was that week in Mexico…). So, when we sat up as Mum entered, we did so not sharply, fearful of being discovered in a stolen moment of closeness, but calmly, with the confidence of lucid dreamers. We floated upwards.

Mum looked at us for a moment before she spoke. I sometimes wonder if she knew back then. I don’t think so, I don’t see why she would have kept her knowing secret, but she _can_ be deceptively perceptive – and, as I said, at that point we weren’t exactly working hard to disguise our love-addled bliss.

“Is everything alright in here for you, Hermione?” she asked.

(It’s going to make my head hurt continuing to refer to you in the second person, Hermione, so for that and for the sake of synchronicity with the rest of the manuscript I’m going to revert to the third. (Synchronicity, she says, while having switched from present to past tense halfway through!) Plus, as you never fail to point out, I’m simply making up much of these twenty-year-old conversations (I don’t remember exactly word-for-word what we were saying to each other back then, sue me), and I think I’ll find it easier to concoct our trademark playful banter when I’m referring to my invented ‘Hermione’ rather than to ‘you’, my wife.)

“Mmm, yes,” Hermione murmured, “fine, Mrs Weasley.”

(I’ve just realised that you’re reading this and I can make you say anything. “I admit it, Ginny,” Hermione confessed tearfully, “it was me and not Rose who ate that slice of quiche you had left in the fridge, I’d come in from work late and I was tired and I barely noticed what I was eating but that doesn’t make it okay, Ginny, I’m sorry, I’m so so sorry-”)

“I’ll have to get your old mattress down from the attic,” Mum was saying, studying the narrow proportions of my childhood bed vis-à-vis the proportions of the two grown women squeezed atop it disapprovingly. “Or we could put you in a bedroom of your own, it’d mean more stairs to climb but I’m sure Ginny won’t mind helping you whenever-”

“Mum, it’s fine,” I interrupted. “Hermione and I can – _mmm_ -” Hermione’s hand had strayed underneath the hem of my t-shirt and was ticklishly exploring the small of my back, and it was about all I could manage to sit still and keep my voice even – “share my bed.”

“It’s quite a small bed,” Mum said doubtfully.

“We’ll sleep close together,” I shrugged.

Mum pursed her lips. “Well, whatever suits you two...”

“Please don’t feel me up in front of my mother,” I requested of Hermione once Mum had departed. “If someone’s going to notice something’s going on it’ll be her.”

“Oh? There’s something going on?”

“Yes, we’re in love.”

“Speak for yourself.”

I poked at her side, and she faux-winced. Then she made to shift further up the bed, and winced for real. I followed her eyes down to the culprit, the thick Healer’s cast encasing her left leg. I placed my hand on her other, uninjured leg and began to run it slowly up and down her bare shin in what I hoped was a soothing manner. “Does it hurt a lot?”

“Yes,” she breathed.

I point to my stroking hand. “Is this helping?”

“Not really, but keep doing it.” As I continued my ministrations she lay back flat against the pillows, closing her eyes. “God, climbing those stairs was agony. I think you’ll have to carry me down to dinner.”

“Fat chance.”

She levered one eye open. “You’re not going to sweep me into your arms?”

“No. You already dug big claw marks into my side on the way up here, look!” I pulled my t-shirt up and twisted side-on to show her the damage. (Reading this over I feel like I’ve already done this exact same bit somewhere earlier in the manuscript, but I’m too lazy to change it now).

“Sorry,” she said. “Would you like me to kiss it better?”

“I suppose,” I relented. “And, I suppose I can bring you your dinner up here.”

“A very kind offer.”

“I’ll bring mine up too. We can conjure up a nice table, some chairs-”

“Some candles, a string quartet playing...”

“It’s a date,” I said.

Fresh out of St. Mungo’s, Hermione was still wearing only a loose-fitting hospital-issue gown and matching flimsy slippers (or rather one slipper, her other foot encased in luminous-yellow bandages). As she sprawled back tiredly on the bed in anticipation of our candlelit dinner, I noticed for the first time that from where I was sitting by her legs I could see rather far up her gown. Edging my still-half-mindedly-massaging hand further and further up her thigh, I reached with the other to remove her slipper and drop it to the floor. “Shoes off the bed,” I tutted.

She sat up a little against the pillows to look at me. “I’m sorry,” she said. She didn’t sound sorry, though. She sounded amorous, invitational. It was an ‘I’m sorry’ which actually said ‘I notice the sexual subtext of your actions and, darling, I am on board’.

Sunlight was streaming in through the window and birds were chirping merrily outside; working gingerly around Hermione’s cast I ate her out. We didn’t even lock the door. Somehow we didn’t really care anymore if we were discovered.

Three weeks later we were out in the fields having a picnic, her legs in my lap and mine in hers, when Hermione told me she urgently needed to go to Australia.

“Why?” I asked.

“My parents are still in Australia, walking about without their real memories. They don’t even know that I exist. I have to go and find them.”

“Hermione, you need more time.” She did. She was still in the cast, and though her leg had gotten a lot better and the pain was almost entirely gone she still struggled to walk by herself. A dozen times on the walk out here she, stubbornly insisting on ambling under her own power, had swayed suddenly and would have fallen if I had not been there to catch her. “You still can’t even walk!”

“I can walk fine. I’ve stayed here long enough. I’ve decided, I’m leaving tomorrow. Ginny, I know it’ll be goodbye, but only for a little while and-”

“No,” I interrupted sharply. “You can’t go alone. You need someone to go with you.”

“Oh, no, I couldn’t ask someone to do that. I mean, for a start it’s going to be expensive getting there. And it would mean going away for a long time, an indefinite amount of time really. Maybe months, I’m not quite sure where my parents are, they might take some finding. I mean, I suppose if someone didn’t _mind_ going away with me for whoever knows how long… Ron, maybe, or maybe Harry – you know, I don’t think he’s ever left the country, it would be good for him, broaden his horizons… why are you looking at me like that?”

Having allowed her to talk herself out, I leaned forward and took her hands firmly. “I’m going with you.”

“What?”

“You’re not going with Harry or bloody Ron. I’m coming with you.”

“Ginny… I mean… well, I suppose that could work. I mean,” she added quickly as I started to grin, “it depends on what your parents say-”

“They won’t care!” I was suddenly laughing. “I’m coming! We’re going to Australia!”

“I suppose we are,” Hermione said rather weakly.

I untangled my legs from hers and sprang to my feet. “I’m going to go back to the house and start packing right now. Are you coming?”

“No, I’ve already packed.”

“So _that’s_ what you’ve been sneaking around doing...”

She smiled ruefully up at me from her seated spot at the base of the tree shading our picnic. “I think I’m going to stay here and read a little while longer,” she said.

“Suit yourself!” I pranced away through the tall grass towards the path back to the house, leaving Hermione alone with her book – I think she had grasped what I deliriously hadn’t quite yet, that despite whatever new exciting adventures lay ahead of us our enchanted summer was finally over, and wanted to take a little time to savour it while it lasted. “G’bye mate!” I called over my shoulder to her. I may even, on the path back to the Burrow, once I was safely out of Hermione’s eyeline, have once or twice attempted to mimic the bouncing motion of a kangaroo.

 

I bumped into Ron in the Burrow’s shaded hallway. “Oh, Ginny,” he said as I went past him to the stairs, “a friend of yours was here asking for you earlier.”

I paused in mid-scamper on the first step. Mentally I had been already plotting what I was going to pack into my battered old handmedown suitcase. “Who?” I asked.

He shrugged. “I didn’t know her. I mean, I’ve seen her face at school, but she didn’t say what her name was...”

“Can you describe her?”

“What am I, a poet? She had brown hair.”

“That narrows it down.”

“I told her you were out with Hermione and where to find you, but she left. She said she’d try again later.”

I nodded at this unhelpfully vague information, too distracted by mine and Hermione’s impending trip to give the matter any thought. I had already half-turned away when Ron said, “oh, by the way – er, Ginny?”

“Yeah?”

“Has Hermione said anything to you about me?”

“No, Ron.” I patted him sympathetically on the shoulder. “I don’t think it’s going to happen, buddy. Chin up. Plenty more fish in the sea. Is Lavender Brown still alive in this timeline?”

I left him there and headed upstairs. I was packing an hour later when I heard someone step into my open bedroom doorway. I turned with a smile, expecting Hermione to have come in early from the field. But it wasn’t Hermione. It was Oakley, obviously.

I went to see her a couple of weeks ago, Hermione. Oh, shall I just tell you about it now? I’m getting quite used to talking to you like this. I’m almost going to miss it when I’ve finished and I have to actually have face to face conversations with you again. We’re running out of milk, by the way! By the time you read this it’ll probably be time for you to go out and buy some! The stuff I like, not the stuff with the purple lid! Thank you!

 

Anyway, Neville and Maddy and the point of all this. It was a few weeks ago, a Friday, and it was about eleven o’clock in the morning when the front doorbell rang. You were at work, Rose was upstairs. I was in the kitchen (to finish setting the scene). I went through to the hall to see who was calling, and-

“Neville!” I exclaimed surprisedly.

“Hi, Ginny,” he said. “You’re not busy, are you? I was hoping to have a quick word.”

“Sure,” I said. “What’s on your mind?”

“It’s – well… Ginny, do you remember Madeleine Oakley? She was in your year at school?”

Well, Hermione, I hadn’t expected  _that_. I hadn’t thought about Maddy since – well, I couldn’t even remember when I had forgotten about her. The name set off a little fizzy eruption of emotions in my stomach, the forgotten emotions bubbling up muted by time and distance but still strong, like – oh, I don’t know, fireworks in the rain? I know writers are meant to do similes and metaphors and stuff but I’m no good at that sort of thing. The feelings came up in fleeting bursts, happiness and sadness and anger – and guilt. Guilt, because I really truly hadn’t thought about Maddy since I was (or at least still felt like I was) barely out of my teens; so when Neville mentioned her I suddenly faced for the first time with hindsight, perspective, real live adult eyes just how appallingly I had treated her back then. We had been friends, before it all – purely, truly friends. We might still’ve been.

“You two were inseparable for a while, if I remember correctly,” Neville prompted.

I tried to play aloof. “I guess… I haven’t seen her in years. More than a decade. Why’d you ask?”

“Her son Ben-”

“See, I didn’t even know she had a son.”

“Well, she does.”

“I’m happy for her,” I said. Neville looked at me quizzically. “She always wanted kids,” I explained. “Is she married, then?”

“No, I don’t think so. I think it’s just her and her son.”

“Oh. Anyway,” I said, “sorry, go on. You’ve got me intrigued now. What about her son?”

I’ll fast-forward through this conversation a bit, Hermione, or we’ll be here all day.

A couple of weeks back Neville was sending out Hogwarts letters. One of those letters went to Maddy’s son Ben, who was meant to be starting this year, but Neville never heard back. So he wrote again – no reply. He wrote one more time, even used his own owl – still nothing. So he went to see them. He thought maybe he had the wrong address, maybe there had been some sort of mistake, maybe it was even what he told me was referred to in education circles as a Potter Scenario. But, no – he went there, saw Ben, saw Maddy – recognised her from school – and nothing was wrong; Ben was the right age, magical, displaying since he was five, he  _should_ have already been starting to pack his suitcase for Hogwarts.

But, Neville said, Maddy had told him that she didn’t  _want_ Ben to go. That she wasn’t going to  _let_ him go. Instead, she said, she was going to send him to the local Muggle school and teach him magic herself in the evenings. Curiouser and curiouser, Hermione!

I asked Neville why Maddy was acting this way. “I have no idea,” he said. “She wouldn’t tell me. Wouldn’t even let me inside. I mean, people choose to homeschool from time to time. It’s not like it’s illegal. It’s just the secrecy that bothers me. I  _saw_ Ben. He seemed like a totally normal kid.”

“So,” I guessed, “you want to know if I have any idea why she won’t let him go?”

“No, not quite – unless, do you?”

“Not a clue,” I shrugged.

“Oh. Well, no, Ginny. I was hoping to ask you to do me a big favour. I’d like you to go and talk to her. Try and find out why she doesn’t want him to go to Hogwarts.”

I blinked. “Why me?”

He looked at me flatly in a manner that made it perfectly clear why he had come to me.

“I mean – like I said, Neville, I haven’t seen her for years and years – and I’m not exactly the sneaky diplomatic sort, there must be loads of people better-suited to this than me – ask her friends, family, I don’t know, teachers she liked at school...”

“I don’t know anyone who knows her better than you do, Ginny.”

“I’m not sure whose social life that’s a more worrying indictment of, yours or hers.” But under his intent and earnest gaze I relented. “Rose better get nothing but Outstandings in every Herbology exam she ever takes,” I said.

He smiled. “You don’t need me to owe you one for that to be the case.”

 

The next day I stood before the address Neville had given me, considering the household he’d indicated from a discreet observation post across the street. There was absolutely nothing to distinguish it from any of the other houses in the quiet, well-to-do residential area. The street was a narrow leafy avenue lined all along by parked cars on both sides; the houses were all semi-detached, two and then two and then two, their first storeys in neat brickwork and their second painted white and criss-crossed with clinging ivy. Do I sound like an estate agent? I never know how much description to do. Maddy’s ground floor curtains were open, but I couldn’t make out anything inside. On the front lawn there was one of those tennis-ball-on-a-pole contraptions, fallen over to a rakish angle. A stone path cut from the gate straight through freshly-mowed grass to the home’s front door.

I started across the street. I had told Neville that I had no idea why Maddy might not want her son to go to Hogwarts, and meant it – but after he left the cogs in my brain had started slowly turning. Now, I had a good hunch I knew the reason – the stupid, unbelievable reason.

The scene: Maddy’s childhood bedroom. It was a black winter night outside the window, and the cold was almost beating at the glass – but inside the radiator was at three bars and the air was toasty-warm. The overhead light was off, but a yellow lamp cast high shadows on the wall behind the two girls sitting cross-legged in their pyjamas on the bed. It was the Christmas break, and I was visiting Maddy at her home. It was the second and final night of my stay.

Her bedroom was bigger than mine, and was made to seem larger still by its less chaotic decoration – watercolours and framed photos rather than posters on top of posters. Like other half-blood houses I had been in the Oakley household was an estuary between two worlds, the wizarding and the Muggle, and Maddy’s room was no exception. There in the open cupboard was Maddy’s broomstick gathering dust beside a tennis racket, there on the wall was a still Muggle photo of Muggle friends beside a moving magical photo of magical ones; there on the cluttered desk on top of a stack of wizarding books was a television with a videotape half-hanging out of the rectangular slot in its base.

Her bed was bigger than mine too (oi oi).

“How did she do it, then?” I asked.

Maddy had taken me to a fair near her home, and it was there she had told me about the fortune teller. Rising winds and sudden snowfall had sent us heading home from the fair early, and as we left she had pointed out the little empty patch of grass where she said a woman had read her future once. I – raised on hilarious stories of crazy Muggles who pretended they could do magic – was highly dubious, but for some reason the encounter seemed to have stuck with Maddy. Now, when I would have been quite content to get beneath the bedcovers with her and watch some Muggle film and partake in a bit of the clumsy groping that was as far as I had allowed her to push the boundaries of our relationship – never discussed, always played as a joke, arse-touching permitted but neither of us yet daring to make a move for the chest or the face let alone between the legs – now, when I was quite ready to let her have her fun, she was talking about the fortune teller again.

God, I’m grinning madly to myself at the thought of you reading this. You, Hermione, who hates Divination like a dog hates cats! I bet that last paragraph already had you thinking, ‘oh no’. Well, it gets worse. Oh, and sorry – me and her are going to be quite cutesy in this. Love you!

“She read my palm,” Maddy said. “Like so.” She took my unresisting right hand in hers and turned it upwards, and began to trace her fingers playfully along the lines of my palm. “It was three predictions for five pounds, the sign said, but she said she liked the look of me so I could ask her an extra question for free. Very generous of her, I felt.”

“Very,” I agreed. I glanced down at her fingers, still exploring the crevasses of my hand. Her left hand was holding my wrist, her thumb to the veins and arteries there, and I thought I could feel her pulse meeting mine. “Are you actually reading my future?”

“Hmm? No, I was just thinking that it really has been a long time since either of us played Quidditch, hasn’t it?” She patted my hand indicatively. “No calluses. I suppose I could spout some half-remembered third-year Divination at you though, if you like. Let’s see. Oh, your life line is clouded. You’ve recently turned down a different path from the one you were meant to take. Soon, you’re going to take a long trip to a hot place.” (She really said that!) “And – I foresee you cleaning your nails in the near future.”

“Because they’re dirty?”

“A bit, yeah.”

Her fingers finally quit their circling, and I prised my hand from her grasp to inspect my nails. I frowned at the dirt trapped there. As I picked away at it, I glanced back up at her. “So, what did you ask her?”

“Oh, just the usual stuff really. First I asked her if I’d ever be rich. She said no.”

“Very materialistic of you.”

“I was thirteen, Ginny. And I don’t  _care_ whether I end up rich or not – it’s just something you ask, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve never paid any mad Muggle women to make up nonsense about my future.”

She smiled. “You’re really up on your high horse about this, aren’t you? I didn’t think you were the super-rational type.”

“I’m not,” I protested. “I believe in Seers and stuff-”

“Well, maybe my fortune teller was a Seer.”

“Seers don’t tell futures at Muggle fairs. They’d be breaching the International Secrecy Act in about twenty places. It wouldn’t be five minutes before the Ministry swooped down and carted them off to Azkaban. Face it, Maddy, you were absolutely mad to give this woman money. I mean, you could have given that money to me.”

“It was three years ago,” she said. “I didn’t know you.”

“Still, I feel like you should give me a few Sickles now to make up for it.”

“I’ll consider it,” she said.

“What else did she tell you, then?” I asked. “You were allowed four questions.”

“Good memory, Ginevra. I’m glad to see you’re paying attention. So, sadly, I’m not going to ever be rich.” She held up one finger to indicate one question posed, then a second one. “I asked her if I would make it into the school sports team that I wanted to get into. She said ‘yes – for a while’.”

“Well obviously,” I pointed out, “unless you were planning to stay at school for the rest of your life.”

“I might not have made the Quidditch team,” Maddy counter-critiqued.

“She must have thought you looked sporty,” I mused. “Or I suppose it doesn’t matter to her a jot if her predictions are wrong or not. All she wants is to get people to pay for as many questions as possible. She moves onto a different place soon enough, and you’re not exactly going to come back and complain anyway if she’s wrong.”

“Fortune teller one Ginny zero,” Maddy said dismissively. “Anyway.” Moving on with her list, she held up a third finger. “I asked her if I’d ever get married. Very cliché, I know. She said ‘yes – for a while’.”

I pouted. “You’re getting married? What about me?”

With Maddy that sort of vaguely flirtatious talk came to me far too easily. I knew it was what she wanted to hear, and most of the time I couldn’t help tugging at her strings. I knew how to pull her closer and how to push her away – what I could never figure out was how to just be her friend.

She smiled at my remark, then held up a fourth finger to indicate her final question. “I asked her if I’d have kids, she said ‘yes’-”

“It gets worse. I feel so betrayed-”

“Then she paused. Her fingers tightened on my wrist." Maddy's manner had grown deliberately theatric. "I said, ‘please don’t say “for a while”’. She looked at me and smiled. She said, ‘no, they’ll be fine’-”

“Yippee for Maddy junior-”

“‘But’, she wagged a finger at me – her hands were horrid by the way, yellow, wrinkly, cigarette-stained-”

“Your hands are much nicer.”

“A grindylow’s hands are much nicer. She wagged her finger at me and said-”

“I expect in a croaky old voice. Probably speaking in rhyme too. Then she cackled and disappeared in a puff of smoke.”

“Then she said-”

“Did she have a black cat?”

“Then she said, ‘but you mustn’t let them go to that school of yours’. I said, ‘why?’”

Distracted by a particularly stubborn piece of dirt beneath the nail of my index finger, it took me a moment to realise that Maddy was waiting for me to ask ‘then what?’. “Then what?”

“She said that I’d paid for four questions and I’d asked four questions. She said I would have to buy some more questions if I wanted to find out.”

“And?” I prompted.

Maddy shrugged, smiled self-effacingly. “I didn’t have any more money.”

 

My memory of that conversation cuts off sharply there. I think I got bored of Maddy talking about her fortune teller and kissed her to shut her up.

So, yeah, that’s why. That’s why Maddy doesn’t want her son to go to Hogwarts and that’s why Neville came to me and that’s why I’m telling you all this, because I tried to convince her how insane she was being that day when I went to see her and failed rather miserably. I told Neville I wouldn’t be any good at that sort of thing, and I wasn’t. I’m not quite sure why I think you’ll be able to talk her round, Hermione. Because you’re my wife and I think you can do anything, I guess.

I don’t remember exactly what Maddy told me her fortune teller said. Probably it was something less matter-of-fact and more obscure and mystical than the way I’ve phrased it here, but that was the essential gist of it. I don’t know why she would have said that to Maddy. You’re a Muggleborn, you did Muggle Studies – their shtick is usually vague flexibly-interpretable fortune-cookie statements, isn’t it, not weirdly specific proscriptions about the schooling of one’s hypothetical children. I suppose she was just trying to get Maddy to buy more questions and it was the first thing she thought of.

I did meet Maddy that day. Neville had told her I’d be coming round. She seemed happy to see me, and I guess I was happy to see her too. I mean, we didn’t hug or anything – I stood here and she stood there and we talked, then I sat here and she sat there and we talked. But even given the reason for our meeting we started falling back into old conversational rhythms a little, remembering how to make each other laugh. I met Ben too. Nice kid. His dad, Maddy’s husband, died a couple of years ago. I guess that’s around the time Maddy decided young Ben might be better off not going to Hogwarts, when she remembered her bloody fortune teller was up to three correct predictions out of four. I did get a little angry, then, confronted in the flesh with the little kid who wouldn’t be going to Hogwarts because, what, some Muggle psychic predicted a marriage would end prematurely? Only fifty per cent of them do! I would have really gone off on Maddy then, but she’d just told me she was a widow so I couldn’t really. I looked at Ben, though, slouched so pitiably in an oversized armchair in the corner of the living room, and internally resolved that I was going to change Maddy’s mind and get him to Hogwarts no matter what.

Then, back home to you and Rose just in time for dinner! I nearly started telling you about everything a dozen times, but I could never find the right words, the right place to begin. Then that night I was sitting up in the office finishing off work and my attention was drifting and I just started writing.  _I told myself solemnly to pull myself together…_  (Incidentally, awful repetition of ‘myself’ in that opening line).

I wrote three chapters before I finally went up to join you in bed. As I climbed into bed I told you I had to tell you something, but you seemed so tired that I just kissed your neck and said I would tell you the next day. The next morning, I told you I was writing a book.

 

Anyway, back to my teenage bedroom. I was packing my bags for Australia and Maddy had just stepped into the doorway. Obviously it didn’t really happen quite as neatly as that; the location was different, the sentiments exchanged the same.

I think she stood there for a few seconds there before I saw her. Finally I noticed someone standing there watching me in the corner of my eye, and glanced up. “Maddy!” I exclaimed. I started upright, skipped across the room to hug her. “How long were you going to just stand there watching me?”

“I think I’d have gotten bored after an hour or so,” she murmured. “I was trying to think of something clever to say.”

For the first time I noticed that she wasn’t reciprocating the hug. I stepped back a little, so that our pressed bodies separated and we were standing six inches apart. She seemed to have somehow grown even taller in the months since we had parted at Kings Cross station; I had to tilt my head up to meet her eyes. Her hair was longer again. “Something clever?” I asked.

“You know. Something like, ‘where are you off to?’ ‘Heading somewhere?’” She delivered the lines in the whiny tones of a character from an American soap opera we had watched at her home at Christmas, impressions of whom had provided us with much merriment in the following months. “‘Three months, you don’t call, you don’t write...’”

“Maddy, I’m sorry, I forgot...”

She tried one more time at the impression, the old joke, though this time her control was shaking and her real voice was breaking through. “‘I thought you were dead...’”

Two seconds passed in silence between us then. In the first I realised how deeply hurt and angry she was. After we parted at Kings Cross I had been spirited away into hiding with the rest of my family. When I didn’t return to school after the Easter holidays… well, Maddy was a smart girl, switched on. She knew the balance of probabilities. I was dead for all she knew. Did I reach out, find some way to contact her? After the battle, did I go and find her? No, I forgot.

In the second second, I realised that she somehow already knew. That me and her were over, that I had moved on. I guess maybe from a sight of my bedroom she could tell – tell I was sharing a bed with another girl, tell from the way our clothes and underclothes were strewn across the floor what we were up to. Probably she could tell just by looking at me. Probably she knew from the first moment she found out I was alive and at liberty and yet had showed not the slightest interest in contacting her.

I mumbled more weak apologies I don’t remember: I had meant to write, meant to find her, only there had been so much going on…

Her eyes landed on the half-full suitcase in the middle of the floor. “So, where  _are_ you going?”

“I’m going away,” I said. “With someone else.”

“How long’s that been going on?”

Don’t tell her the truth, I thought. “Since before we were friends,” I said.

 _That_ surprised her. Her lips moved wordlessly for a moment. All she could finally manage was, “what happened?” I knew what she meant.

“You know… my parents took me away at Easter, and suddenly you seemed so far away. Like you were from another world, like how the memory of a dream fades so quickly. And she was so close again, even when she wasn’t there… then everything happened, and me and her were back together, and she came back here. She’s been staying here for three weeks. We’re going to Australia,” I added.

“You’re going to Australia,” she repeated numbly.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Why not?” I shrugged. I remember just wanting her to  _leave_ , then, suddenly feeling so  _angry_ at her for having the temerity to disturb mine and your perfect summer. I suppose I was really angry at myself, for the way I had treated her and the reminder she provided of my straying from you, but I didn’t exactly realise that then. In that moment I just wanted to lash out, hurt her.

“Well,” she said, “that’s okay.”

“That’s okay?”

“Yeah, it’s fine. We had fun. I mean, we can still be friends. Nothing’s stopping that. We can still play Quidditch-”

“No,” I cut her off, “we can’t.”

She blinked. “What? Why?”

“I don’t think that would be a good idea,” I said.

“But – we’ll be back at Hogwarts together-” her sentences were rapidly growing more and more staccato - “Transfiguration class – we can still study together-”

“No, we can’t. I really don’t think we should see each other at all anymore.”

“Ginny – please-”

“You should go,” I said.

 

I was still packing my suitcase when you came back in from the field. You sat down beside me on the floor, wrapped an arm around my waist and kissed my cheek. “How’s packing going?” you asked.

“Fine,” I said.

“Be sure to take plenty of suntan lotion. It’s winter there, but you’ll still burn to a crisp.” Your lips strayed down my neck. “I talked to your parents downstairs, they said you talked to them. That everything’s okay for our trip. They said you had a friend round?”

“Oh,” I said, “no one. Just someone from school.”

“School,” you murmured in my ear. “Were you lonely without me all year?”

“Yes,” I said, “very lonely.”

“Well, we’ll be in seventh year together next year. We’ll be able to keep each other company.”

“Good,” I said.

Hermione, I’ll be honest, I’ve had a few glasses of wine writing this last few thousand words. It’s not my best work, I’m sure. Anyway it doesn’t matter. You don’t have time to read it. I’ll tell you the short version of everything tomorrow morning, and then we’ll go off to Maddy’s and convince her to change her mind and everything will be alright with the world again. You’ll see.


	9. Chapter 9

“I still can’t believe your first thought was to take Harry to Australia instead of me,” I comment to Hermione as we get into the car.

“I was thinking tactically. He isn’t afraid of spiders. You on the other hand, I seem to recall, were an absolute bloody wimp about them the entire time we were there.”

As I clunk the car into gear and we putter out of the driveway, I glance over my shoulder towards the back seat. “Don’t listen to her, Rose. I was very brave.”

It takes a moment for the twelve year old, eyes glued to the tablet in her lap, to realise I’m speaking to her. Reluctantly she removes one earbud. “Pardon, Ginny?”

“Nothing, honey,” I say. “Go back to your game.”

As she puts her earbud back in and is once more lost to the world, I turn back towards the front of the car and glance sidelong at Hermione. “ _And_ I still can’t believe you ate my quiche.”

“Funny, I still can’t believe you made me read fifty thousand words instead of just having a conversation with me.”

“Fair point,” I concede. “That reminds me, though, you still need to finish the manuscript. We can read the last few chapters tonight.”

“Oh no. I’m never touching that thing again. It’s going straight into the bin when we get back. No, wait, in fact – the fireplace.”

“I’m that bad a writer, huh?”

She sighs. “It’s not _bad_ , Ginny. I just wish you’d channelled your creative energies into something other than an ode to your ex-girlfriend.”

“You wouldn’t call it an ode if you’d read the part where I dumped her.”

“Yes, you told me about that. Is there anything left in the manuscript that you didn’t tell me this morning?”

“Nope, I think I covered pretty much everything.”

“Well, there’s no need for me to finish reading it then.”

As I turn out of our street and onto the main road, Hermione clutches the sides of her seat and breathes in loudly through her teeth. “What?” I grumble. “Did I nearly clip that car?”

“No, you nearly clipped that child.”

“Are you going to suggest that you drive?”

“No, I was going to suggest that Rose drives.”

  


“So,” Hermione says a little way down the road, “you broke things off with Oakley.”

“Yes.”

“Then lied to me about her visiting you.”

“Yep.”

“Then you lied to me for the next twenty years about having had a thing with someone else.”

I shoot her a quick sideways look, unable to tell by her voice alone whether she’s playful-angry or angry-angry.

“Okay,” she allows after a moment, “not lying – omitting. I never asked.”

Playful. I breathe out.

“But,” she goes on, voice rising, “we were all in seventh year together, Ginny! Me and you and this Oakley girl, and you never said anything! We were all in the same Transfiguration class, for heaven’s sake!”

Alright, mostly playful. A little real anger and hurt in there too, though. “I _am_ sorry, Hermione,” I say. “I know I should have told you. But it really was nothing even worth mentioning. We were never a _thing_ , not even secretly. It was just a whole lot of repressed pathetic cowardly should-we-will-we that never amounted to anything. Neither of us ever even worked up the courage to talk about it.” As I return my eyes to the road she sits silent beside me, and as the uncomfortable vacuum endures I feel the increasing need to fill it. “Are you really bothered about this?”

“No,” she sighs, “not _really_ bothered. Only slightly bothered. It was all very long ago. It’s not what you didn’t tell me that’s got my head spinning, Ginny, it’s what you told me this morning. You wrote a whole book to try and explain this to me and I still feel like I barely know what’s going on.”

“Neville asked me-”

“I know, I know, Neville and Hogwarts and Oakley’s son and somehow some bloody palm-reader is involved and somehow it all adds up to us going to visit her now. Now, on the last weekend before Rose goes back to school, on a frankly gorgeous afternoon, when really we three should be doing something rather more productive. Like eating ice cream somewhere.”

“We’re going to try and change her mind.”

“But why are you even getting involved? You did what Neville asked you to do.”

I shrug. “Her son seems like a nice kid. He’s going to miss out on going to Hogwarts for an insane reason. Seems wrong.”

Hermione chews that over. She seems to sense I’ve left something unsaid. “And?”

“And, well – I don’t know,” I say helplessly. “There’s just this whole messy bundle of feelings in my stomach about all this. I’ve been writing for two weeks and I still haven’t managed to untangle it. Guilt’s a biggie. Ever since Neville mentioned Maddy and brought all these memories flooding back I’ve just been walking around feeling like the biggest piece of shit – it’s okay,” I add quickly as Hermione’s eyes dart towards the back seat, “she can’t hear a thing we’re saying with those in.”

“You’ve been feeling guilty? That’s not like you.”

“I’ve just been feeling horrible about the way I treated Maddy back then. Totally cutting her off. I was sixteen the first time, but even that’s no excuse – and the times afterwards...”

“Oh? Did you shoot her down again?”

“No, it was more like I riddled the corpse.”

She half-laughs, half-frowns. “A pleasant image.”

“An accurate one. I don’t think Maddy ever had any hope of us getting back together. I don’t think she even wanted to. She knew it was over, she just wanted to be friends again. But I repeatedly demurred. Sometimes politely, sometimes … less so.”

“So tell me about these other times you keep mentioning. When you saw her again.” I hear the smile creeping into her voice. “I want places and dates.”

“Well, there was seventh year of school obviously.”

“God, Ginny – you know, now you’ve got me thinking about her I’m starting to remember a bit more about Oakley from school. Merlin, I used to talk to her in Charms class! I was utterly oblivious, I had _no_ idea… she was probably sitting there hating my guts.”

“We managed to avoid each other totally for a few months,” I go on. “Then, you know, time passes. We got less careful, less scrupulous about avoiding each other. I think it was in the library we bumped into each other. We exchanged a few words, one of us made a weak joke, the other laughed, we parted ways… the next day we saw each other again. She asked me how I was doing with the Transfiguration homework, I asked her to please kill me. She leant over my shoulder and tried to help me with it for a couple of minutes before a friend appeared and she had to go. The next day after Transfiguration we were chatting as we left class just like old times. She asked me if I wanted to go and study with her. _Then_ I realised what was happening. I stopped it right there. Said no, said I still couldn’t see her. That I didn’t _want_ to see her.”

“A more paranoid spouse might think you didn’t trust yourself to have her in your life.”

“It’s not that. Really. I just didn’t think it was fair on her. For us to spend any time together with her feeling the way she did and me not interested. I thought it was cruel.”

“Well, you were certainly never cruel to her.”

I sigh. “She seems to bring out a side of me that no one else does. A bad side. A side I don’t like. Not like you.” I smile over at her. “You bring out my good parts.”

“Yes, I’ve seen your good parts.”

“Now who’s being lewd in front of Rose? Thankfully she’s still wearing those headphones I bought her.”

“ _Thankfully_ tinnitus is curable by magic.”

“Tinni-what?”

“Never mind. Did you ever see Oakley after that, then? After school?”

“A few times,” I say levelly. “Three or four chance encounters before our fates seemed to diverge for good.”

“You’ve been writing too much. You’re starting to talk in prose.”

“Different places,” I go on, “same pattern. We’d bump into each other in the shops or at work or at a party or whatever, get on well, start falling back into old friendly rhythms. Sometimes I’d humour her for longer, sometimes shorter. Then-”

“The cold shoulder.”

“Utter rebuffal. The last time we were twenty-four, I think. Never saw her again after that. We got married six months later,” I add as an afterthought.

“We were still in Paris then,” Hermione muses. “What was she doing there?”

I shrug. “I ran into her in a _boulangerie_. We halved a baguette then I told her to stay away from me forever.”

Hermione consults the roadmap she’s holding. “Turn off here,” she says.

I do so. “I think somehow,” I comment as I guide the car off of the motorway, “it’s because I feel so guilty about how I was to Maddy that I feel like I have to help her through this craziness.”

“Do you think she’s really...” Hermione spins a euphemistic circle around her ear with her index finger.

“No,” I shake my head quickly, “she’s just grieving. I’ve been to enough Quidditch World Cup finals to know that grief can make people do some pretty nutty stuff. She just needs a bit of help getting through it.”

We fall silent for a while, the only sound the low rumble of the car engine as we hoover up the miles. It would have been so much easier to just Apparate or take the Floo Network, but we can’t take Rose by the former and the three of us can’t just show up in Maddy’s fireplace uninvited.

“So,” Hermione says eventually, “what else is in your messy bundle?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You said your feelings about Oakley were a big messy jumble. Well, besides guilt, what else do you feel?”

I pause to consider. “Well, I guess there’s happiness too.”

“Happiness?”

“At the thought of seeing her again,” I say.

“You’re getting involved with this because you want to see her?”

“No. Yes. Not like that. I mean, we were friends. Best friends, for a while. I like her as a friend. As a friend she’s great. She’s smart and funny and likes the same things I do... I _was_ happy to see her again. I’m always happy to see her.”

“Do you want to be friends with her again?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. I’m not a stupid kid anymore who thinks they can’t be friends with their ex. But I don’t know if she even wants to. I wouldn’t blame her if she didn’t want anything to do with me at this point. And,” I hurriedly add, “it’d be your call, anyway.”

“Ginny, you can be friends with whomever you like. We’ve been married for fourteen years, it’d take considerably more than you renewing a friendship with some daft Divination-believing bint you knew twenty years ago for me to feel threatened.” She pauses. “Why do you think I can help you with her, anyway? Why would she listen to me of all people?”

“There was a cute line about why I think you’ll be able to help in the manuscript.”

“It’s a shame it’ll go up in flames then. Do tell.”

“Look, Maddy is smart. And you’re the cleverest person I’ve ever met. You two’ll get along. I’m hoping you’ll be able to appeal to her better, more rational side. I can’t appeal to that side of her. The side of her that I can connect to – _that’s_ the part that’s causing this craziness.”

“So what’s going to happen when we get there?”

“Rose and I get out of the way and let you at her.”

“You’re expecting Oakley to just let us in to lecture her?” she asks. “Invite us in for tea and biscuits?”

“Yeah,” I say.

“Why?”

“Because she likes me.”

  


“Ginny?” Hermione says as I’m easing the car into a parking space a few doors down from Maddy’s.

“Yeah?” I ask distractedly, head whipped around a hundred and fifty degrees to the right.

“Were you ever going to tell me about her?”

I nudge the steering wheel right, then right again. “Am I in far enough?”

She peers out of her window. “Just about.”

“Well, just about’ll have to do.” I put the handbrake on and turn the engine off. As I unbuckle my seatbelt I glance up at Hermione. “Why would I tell you about her?”

“Because keeping secrets is bad?”

“It’s not keeping secrets, it’s just … not mentioning something that happened. Like yesterday I had a pickle sandwich at work, but I didn’t tell you that. That’s not keeping a secret from you, that’s just a pickle sandwich. That’s how inconsequential Maddy is to my life, Hermione. I literally forgot she existed for a decade.”

She raises an eyebrow. “Forgot so much that you filled half a book with memories of her.” But she drops the subject and looks to the back seat. “Ready, Rose?”

“I guess,” the girl says. “Where are we going again? You told me but I wasn’t listening.”

“We’re going to see an old friend of mine,” I say. “Her son Ben should be going to Hogwarts this year, but Mummy’s gone a little cuckoo and doesn’t want him to go. So, we’re going to try and change her mind.”

“Oh. Why did I have to come?”

“Well, firstly your mum and I can’t leave you in the house all alone, can we? And secondly, because you can tell Ben and his mum all about how brilliant Hogwarts is.”

“Hogwarts is pretty good,” she says thoughtfully.

“Exactly. Probably when mean old Maddy sees you and Ben playing nicely together she’ll come straight to her senses and her and your mums won’t even need to have a long boring grown-up _talk_.”

Rose seems cheered by the prospect of getting home quicker, but then something seems to occur to her and her nose crinkles. “I have to talk to a _boy_?”

“It’ll be fun,” I say. “Like a playdate.”

She gives that statement the withering look it deserves. “Can I bring my tablet?”

“Sure,” I say. “Better than leaving it here. I’m sure I read somewhere that Muggles like to steal things out of cars.”


	10. Chapter 10

As I stand there on the doorstep the nerves rush in for a moment. A voice in the back of my mind warns how crazy and stupid and arrogant I must be to even consider bringing Hermione here. The voice is the sensible part of me, the part fostered and nourished by twenty years with my wife, and it seems to almost speak with her voice. I ignore it.

I glance aside at Hermione. Between our close bodies I squeeze her hand. “I love you,” I murmur.

“Ugh,” I hear Rose comment behind us.

Smiling, I reach up and ring the doorbell. “Let’s get this over with,” I say.

A boy answers the door. Ben. _God he looks like her_ , I think.

“Hi,” he says to me. His eyes slide across to Hermione, then past us to Rose. He blinks. “I’ll get my mum,” he says.

I watch him disappear back into the house, then glance aside at Hermione. “Cute kid,” she offers.

“Yeah,” I concur.

“Although I don’t suppose I should have expected any less, given you’ve spent the last two weeks writing about how pretty his mother is.”

“I have not.”

“No, I suppose that’s fair. I don’t know if you ever called her _pretty_. What were your preferred adjectives, again? Oh, there was _tall_ , you used that five hundred and forty-three times; _handsome_ , you didn’t like that one so much, only three hundred and twenty times; _lithe_ -”

“I did not call her _lithe_.”

“Alright then, lean.”

“She is lean.”

“Am I not lean?”

“I think you have to be sporty to be lean – I mean,” I change tack hastily at the affronted look on her face, “of course you are, you’re the leanest person I know-”

“What are you guys talking about?” Rose interrupts.

“Nothing, honey,” we say in unison.

A few seconds later Maddy steps into the half-open doorway. For a heartbeat she just looks blankly down from the doorstep at us. In that moment I’m confronted by the sheer ludicrosity of what we’re attempting. Sure, Maddy seemed friendly enough when I talked to her before, but Hermione and I are surely the very two women in the world she’s least likely to entertain – her spurning ex and the woman she was spurned for. Why would she even let us in the door, never mind let us change her mind about her son’s future? What intricacies, deceits, pleads and gambits will we have to employ to even get past the front step? I look up at Maddy and see an unknowable flicker pass along her brow, an unreadable twitch along her lips. Twenty years of pain and bitterness seems writ large across her face.

“Hi!” she says brightly. “Come in!”

 

“So, after school I started working as a researcher for Professor Squiggly-Wiggly at the Something-Something Institute.”

“You’re kidding? The same Squiggly-Wiggly who invented the Boggy-Woggly Charm?”

“Yes,” Maddy rejoins to Hermione, whose eyes widen impressedly. You’ll have to forgive my gibberish interpolations of proper names – I’m not exactly following all the nuances of this conversation. “Though if you listen to him all he did was make the coffee, he’s _so_ modest...”

“Yes, I’ve heard that too! Obviously I’m just a keen amateur, I’m kept far too busy at the Ministry to even think about any experiments of my own, I just follow the journals – but I’m _so_ interested in his work on refracted Thingymajiggers...”

“Oh, I was his leading technician on that!”

Hermione’s jaw drops. “You’re kidding! You mean you got to work with the thermo-transfigurative-”

“Work with it? I built it!”

Hermione’s knees twitch; I think she may have just orgasmed.

“Though of course,” Maddy’s voice falls an octave, “that’s all in the past now.”

“Oh? You’re not working with him anymore? Are you still private or have you gone Ministry? I don’t think I’ve seen you around...”

“No, I’m neither now sadly. I left the industry a year and a half ago. I’m now engaged in a full-time unpaid position. A long-term case study with one subject. Motherhood,” she adds with a smile at Hermione’s furrowed brow.

I sit silently between them as they talk, Maddy in a chair to my left and Hermione on the couch beside me to my right, my eyes darting politely back and forth from face to face. I feel like I’m at a tennis match. I suppose this means my half-baked plan is taking root; I should be happy. I’d just underestimated how boring the ensuing conversation between the brainiacs would be. Abruptly I stand.

“Have you read Blah-Blah-Blah’s work on something-something-something recently?” Maddy is saying. “It was just published in the This-And-That journal-”

Hermione’s eyes light up. “Oh gosh yes, of course, it’s fantastic isn’t it-”

“I’m going to go check on the kids,” I say. They barely notice me leaving. I drift away upstairs, to where I imagine the conversation will be more on my intellectual level.

 

“Merlin could _not_ beat Dumbledore!”

“Could so!”

“Shush, my mum’s coming!”

“You shush!”

I clamber up the last few steps onto the landing just in time to see a Chocolate Frog card thrown out of an open bedroom door. I poke my head around the doorway. “Everything alright in here?”

The children instantly unionise against me, a solemn fraternity of two formed. “Yes,” they say.

“No problems?” I prod.

“Nope,” Rose says.

I stoop to pick up the thrown card from the hallway floor. On the reverse Ben’s name is written neatly in the margins; on the face side is Merlin, the millennium-old wizard looking rather dazed by his sudden flight. “Rose, what have I told you about snatching things from other people and throwing them?”

She thinks it over. “To not do it?”

“Correct.”

“Sorry,” she concedes.

“Don’t apologise to me,” I chide, “apologise to Ben.” I show a stern face but inwardly I’m making a mental note to gloat to Hermione; we have a little long-running private game between us each week where we compete to see who can get in the most classic ‘mum’ sayings, and that little doozy has just pushed me clear into first place with only a few hours left to play. Every Saturday night the winner gets whatever they want from the loser in bed. Annoyingly for me, Hermione tends to win.

Rose mutters an apology to Ben and they resume their card game, the acrimony dissipated as quickly as it had flared. I stay in the doorway for a while, at first watching them play then looking around curiously at Ben’s bedroom. It’s a nice room – big and bright and airy, but cosy too. My withered old heart pangs nostalgically as I take in sights oh-so-familiar to me from my childhood growing up with six brothers – the Quidditch posters aligned infuriatingly not-quite-straight, the toys strewn about the floor as if positioned deliberately for an unsuspecting younger sister to slip on, the lone cuddly toy to survive the onset-of-adolescence purge embarrassedly half-hidden beneath the bedsheets. It’s almost the sort of room to make you wish you were eleven again. I say almost, because the picture is just missing a few little things. A half-packed suitcase. A pile of new unopened books. An owl or a cat or a toad. Only a few little things – and yet in comparison to Rose’s bedroom back home this room feels like some sort of architectural Dementor has swooped down and sucked its soul out.

I look to my left and see a new Muggle school blazer hanging on the door of Ben’s wardrobe. I shake my head then, anger at Maddy flaring. All this just doesn’t compute in my head. My brain cannot reconcile the girl I knew, the woman she still seems to be, with the ludicrous superstition she claims to be in thrall to. Like with one of those optical illusions, where your brain doesn’t understand what’s going on so invents stuff to try and form a coherent picture, my brain now is constantly reaching conspiratorially for alternative explanations. _She’s dying. He’s dying. They’re both dying._ I haven’t landed on a satisfying theory yet, but I have a feeling in my gut that there’s one out there. A grand unified theory of Madeleine Oakley that’ll make all of this make sense to me. I just have to find it.

Rose’s sharp heated tones drag me out of my thoughts, just as I’m getting around to wondering how Hermione is getting on downstairs. She and Ben sit in the centre of the room’s cushy deep-blue carpet facing one another, several tottery piles of Chocolate Frog cards between them. Rose’s tablet sits forgotten and discarded a few feet away. “No, no, no,” Rose is saying, “you’re doing it all _wrong_!”

“How can you play cards wrong?”

“I don’t know, Ben, but you’re managing it!”

“Rose,” I warn curtly, “be nice. I’ve seen you be nice in the past at least once, so I know you can do it.” I cross to sink into a cross-legged position beside them on the carpet. “Do you two mind if I stay up here for a while? Your mums are talking about _work_. Very boring.”

They glance at one another. “Fine,” they assent after a second’s silent communication.

“Great. So,” I say, shuffling a pile of cards idly, “what’ve you two been talking about? Have you been talking to Ben about school, Rose?”

Rose rolls her eyes. “Thanks a _lot_ , Ginny. I was _working_ up to it. Now it’s all _ruined_.”

“Oops,” I say. “Sorry.” I glance sideways at Ben. When I said he looked like Maddy, it wasn’t really their appearance I meant – he’s fair-haired rather than dark, brown-eyed rather than blue – but their mannerisms. Looking at them it’s quite uncanny. They both seem always in a slight state of restless tension, always slightly distrustful, body always all at awkward angles whether sitting or standing. It must be hereditary. “So, Ben,” I say, “when are you back to school? Next week?”

“The week after,” he says.

“Excited?”

He shrugs. “Not really.”

“Now,” I say, “Rose – there’s a girl who’s excited to be going back to school. Am I right, Rose?”

“You sure are, Ginny,” she says precociously. “Hogwarts is the best school in the world.”

Ben looks flatly from her to me, plainly seeing through our cunning gambit at its outset. He says nothing for a few seconds, considering his handful of playing cards, then sets them down onto the carpet. “You win,” he says to Rose. “It’s a stupid game anyway.” While Rose bristles at his diminution of her victory, he looks at me. “Do you work at Hogwarts too, then? Like that professor?”

“No,” I say. “I’m just sticking my nose in because – well, because I think you should go.”

“Why?” he asks.

“Because all young witches and wizards go. Because it’s the best years of your life. Because you’ll make friends you’ll have the _rest_ of your life. Trust me, you’d never forgive your mum if she didn’t let you go. Has she told you why she doesn’t want you to?”

He shrugs again. “She’s told me some. It’s not safe or something. I don’t know.”

“Well, don’t you want to know? Don’t you want to know why you’re missing out?”

He just looks at me, stolid brown-eyed stare utterly unrelenting. “She’s my mum,” is all he says.

“Aren’t you sad to not be going?” I continue. “Don’t you have friends who’re going?”

“Some, I guess. But I have Muggle friends too. My best friend is a Muggle. I’m going to the same school as them. And I won’t have to wear a stupid pointy hat there.”

“Have you got a wand yet, Ben?” I’m grasping at straws. “Rose has a wand. Look, she’ll show you it.”

“Mum’s going to get me one after the first of September,” he tells me evenly. “She says they go on a half-price sale then.”

I see there’ll be no radicalising this one. No turning him against his mother. “Okay,” I smile, conceding defeat. “I’m sorry I brought it up. That’s something me and your mum should talk about, not something I should be bothering you with. I’ll leave you two to your games.”

He blinks, and the intensity of his gaze upon me washes away to leave him looking suddenly very young. His expression is a dead ringer for Maddy's _Ginny's-been-mean_ look. I guess that must be hereditary too. “Thanks,” he says quietly. 

I straighten and leave them. But when I step out into the hallway I’m frozen by a sudden fear – the fear that downstairs Hermione and Maddy are still talking about advanced magical theory. I can’t face any more of that. I can’t go down there. I decide to hide in the bathroom until they’re done talking. I find a comfortable perch on the toilet seat and open a months-old copy of _Witch Weekly_.

As I sit there on the toilet the nerves rush in for a moment. A voice in the back of my mind warns how insane I must be to leave Hermione and Maddy alone down there. I’ve just stood up, my purposes uncertain, when I hear someone coming up the stairs.

“Everything okay up here?” I hear Maddy call. “Okay, kids?”

“Yes,” I hear them say, meek as lambs.

“Where’s Ginny, then?” I hear her ask them. “If you three are playing hide and seek, you don’t look like you’re trying very hard to find her.”

I step out of the bathroom, and she glances over her shoulder. When she sees me she smiles. “Oh. Never mind, I found her. I win.”


End file.
